Volume 4 — OF ISIS AND OSIRIS, OR OF THE ANCIENT RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF EGYPT. (continued 2)

seems to me to denote his imperial power by supremest, and his well-advisedness and discretion by Counsellor. They also oftentimes describe this God by a hawk, because he exceeds in quickness of sight and velocity in flying, and sustains himself with very little food. He is also said to fly over the bodies of dead men that lie unburied, and to drop down earth upon their eyes. Likewise, when he alights down upon the bank of any river to assuage his thirst, he sets his feathers up on end, and after he hath done drinking, he lets them fall again. Which he plainly doth because he is now safe and escaped from the danger of the crocodile; but if he chances to be catched, his feathers then continue stiff as before. They also show us everywhere Osiris’s statue in the shape of a man, with his private part erect, to betoken unto us his faculty of generation and nutrition; and they dress up his images in a flame-colored robe, esteeming the sun as the body of the power of good, and as the visible image of intelligible substance. Wherefore we have good reason to reject those that ascribe the sun’s globe unto Typhon, to whom appertaineth nothing of a lucid or salutary nature, nor order, nor generation, nor motion attended with measure and proportion, but the clean contrary to them. Neither is that parching drought, which destroys many animals and plants, to be accounted as an effect of the sun, but of those winds and waters which in the earth and air are not tempered according to the season, at which time the principle of the unordered and interminate nature acts at random, and so stifles and suppresses those exhalations that should ascend.

52. Moreover, in the sacred hymns of Osiris they call him up “who lies hidden in the arms of the sun.” And upon the thirtieth day of the month Epiphi they keep a certain festival called the Birthday of the eyes of Horus, when the sun and the moon are in one direct line; as esteeming not only the moon but also the sun to be the eye and light of Horus. Likewise the three and twentieth day of the month Phaophi they make to be the nativity of the staves of the sun, which they observe after the autumnal equinox, intimating hereby that he now wants, as it were, a prop and a stay, as suffering a great diminution both of heat and light by his declining and moving obliquely from us. Besides this, they lead the sacred cow seven times about her temple at the time of the winter solstice. And this going round is called the seeking of Osiris, the Goddess being in great distress for water in winter time. And the reason of her going round so many times is because the sun finishes his passage from the winter to the summer tropic in the seventh month. It is reported also that Horus, the son of Isis, was the first that ever sacrificed to the sun upon the fourth day of the month, as we find it written in a book called the Birthdays of Horus. Moreover, they offer incense to the sun three times every day; resin at his rising, myrrh when it is in the mid-heaven, and that they call Kyphi about the time of his setting. (What each of these means, I shall afterwards explain.) Now they are of opinion that the sun is atoned and pacified by all these.

But to what purpose should I heap together many things of this nature? For there are some that scruple not to say plainly that Osiris is the sun, and that he is called Sirius by the Greeks, although the Egyptians, adding the article to his name, have obscured and brought its sense into question. They also declare Isis to be no other than the moon, and say that such statues of her as are horned were made in imitation of the crescent; and that the black habit in which she so passionately pursues the sun, sets forth her disappearings and eclipses. For which reason they used to invoke the moon in love-concerns; and Eudoxus also saith that Isis presides over love-matters. Now these things have in them a show and semblance of reason; whereas they that would make Typhon to be the sun deserve not to be heard.

53. But we must again resume our proper discourse. Isis is indeed that property of Nature which is feminine and receptive of all production; in which sense she was called the nurse and the all-receiver by Plato, and the Goddess with ten thousand names by the common sort, because being transmuted by reason she receives all manner of shapes and guises. But she hath a natural love to the prime and principal of all beings (which is the good principle), and eagerly affects it and pursues after it; and she shuns and repels her part of the evil one. And although she be indeed both the receptacle and matter of either nature, yet she always of herself inclines to the better of them, and readily gives way to it to generate upon her and to sow its effluxes and resemblances into her; and she rejoices and is very glad when she is impregnated and filled with productions. For generation is the production of an image of the real substance upon matter, and what is generated is an imitation of what is in truth.

54. And therefore not without great consonancy do they fable that the soul of Osiris is eternal and incorruptible but that his body is often torn in pieces and destroyed by Typhon, and that Isis wanders to and fro to look him out, and when she hath found him, puts him together again. For the permanent being, the mental nature, and the good, is itself above corruption and change; but the sensitive and corporeal part takes off certain images from it, and receives certain proportions, shapes, and resemblances, which, like impressions upon wax, do not continue always, but are swallowed up by the disorderly and tumultuous part, which is chased hither from the upper region and makes war with Horus, who is born of Isis, being the sensible image of the mental world. For which reason he is said to be prosecuted for bastardy by Typhon, as not being pure and sincere,—like his father, the pure absolute reason, unmixed and impassible,—but embased with matter by corporeity. But he gets the better of him, and carries the cause, Hermes (that is, reason) witnessing and proving that Nature produces the world by becoming herself of like form with the mental property. Moreover, the generation of Apollo by Isis and Osiris, while the Gods were yet in Rhea’s womb, hints out unto us that, before this world became visible and was completed by reason, matter, being convinced by Nature that she was imperfect alone, brought forth the first production. For which reason they also say, this deity was born a cripple in the dark, and they call him the elder Horus; for he was not the world, but a kind of a picture and phantom of the world to be afterwards.

55. This Horus is terminate and complete of himself, yet hath he not quite destroyed Typhon, but only taken off his over great activity and brutal force. Whence it is they tell us that at Copto the statue of Horus holds fast in hand the privities of Typhon; and they fable that Mercury took out Typhon’s sinews and used them for harp-strings, to denote unto us that, when reason composed the universe, it made one concord out of many discords, and did not abolish but accomplish[28] the corruptible faculty. Whence it comes that this power, being weak and feeble in the present state of things, blends and mixes with passible and mutable parts of the world, and so becomes in the earth the causer of concussions and shakings, and in the air of parching droughts and tempestuous winds, as also of hurricanes and thunders. It likewise infects both waters and winds with pestilential diseases, and runs up and insolently rages as high as the very moon, suppressing many times and blackening the lucid part, as the Egyptians believe. They relate that Typhon one while smote Horus’s eye, and another while plucked it out and swallowed it up, and afterwards gave it back to the sun; intimating by the blow the monthly diminution of the moon, and by the blinding of him its eclipse, which the sun cures again by shining presently upon it as soon as it hath escaped from the shadow of the earth.

56. Now the better and more divine nature consists of three; or of the intelligible part, of matter, and of that which is made up of both, which the Greeks call Cosmos (that is trimness) and we the world. Plato therefore uses to name the intelligible part the form, the sample, and the father; and matter the mother, the nurse, and the seat and receptacle of generation; and that again which is made up of both, the offspring and the production. And one would conjecture that the Egyptians called it the most perfect of triangles, because they likened the nature of the universe principally to that; which Plato also in his Commonwealth seems to have made use of to the same purpose, when he forms his nuptial diagram. Now in that triangle the perpendicular consists of three parts, the base of four, and the subtense of five, its square being equal in value with the squares of the two that contain it. We are therefore to take the perpendicular to represent the male property, the base the female, and the subtense that which is produced by them both. We are likewise to look upon Osiris as the first cause, Isis as the faculty of reception, and Horus as the effect. For the number three is the first odd and perfect number, and the number four is a square, having for its side the even number two. The number five also in some respects resembles the father and in some again the mother, being made up of three and two; besides, πάντα (all things) seems to be derived from πέντε (five), and they use πεμπάσασθαι (which is telling five) for counting.[29] Moreover, the number five makes a square equal to the number of letters used among the Egyptians, as also to the number of years which Apis lived. They are also used to call Horus Min, which signifieth as much as seen; for the world is perceptible to sense and visible. And Isis they sometimes call Muth, and sometimes again Athyri, and sometimes Methyer. And by the first of these names they mean mother, by the second Horus’s mundane house (as Plato calls it, the place and receptacle of generation); but the third is compounded of two words, the one whereof signifies full, and the other the cause; for the matter of the world is full, and it is closely joined with the good and pure and well ordered principle.

57. And it may be, Hesiod also, when he makes the first things of all to be chaos, earth, hell, and love, may be thought to take up no other principles than these, if we apply these names as we have already disposed them, to wit, that of earth to Isis, that of love to Osiris, and that of hell to Typhon; for he seems to lay the chaos under all, as a kind of room or place for the world to lie in. And the subject we are now upon seems in a manner to call for Plato’s tale, which Socrates tells us in the Symposium about the production of Eros (or Love), where he saith, that once on a time Poverty, having a mighty desire of children, laid her down by Plenty’s side as he was asleep, and that she thereupon conceiving by him brought forth Eros, who was of a nature both mixed and various, as coming of a father that was good and wise and had sufficiency of all things, but of a mother that was very needy and poor; and that by reason of her indigence she still hankered after another, and was eagerly importunate for another. For this same Plenty is no other than the first amiable, desirable, complete, and sufficient being; and matter is that which he called Poverty, she being of herself alone destitute of the property of good, but when she is impregnated by it, she still desires and craves for more. Moreover, the world (or Horus) that is produced out of these two, being not eternal, nor impassible, nor incorruptible, but ever a making, does therefore machinate, partly by shifting of accidents and partly by circular motions, to remain still young and never to die.

58. But we must remember that we are not to make use of fables as if they were doctrinal throughout, but only to take that in each of them which we shall judge to make a pertinent resemblance. And therefore, when we treat of matter, we need not (with respect to the sentiments of some philosophers) to conceit in our minds a certain body void of soul and of all quality, and of itself wholly idle and unactive. For we use to call oil the matter of an unguent, and gold the matter of a statue, though they are not destitute of all quality. And we render the very soul and mind of a man as matter to reason, to be dressed up and composed into science and virtue. There have been some also that have made the mind to be a receptacle of forms and a kind of imprimary for things intelligible; and some are of opinion again that the genital humidity in the female sex is no active property nor efficient principle, but only the matter and nutriment of the production. Which when we retain in our memories, we ought to conceive likewise that this Goddess, which always participates of the first God and is ever taken up with the love of those excellencies and charms that are about him, is not by nature opposite to him; but that, as we are used to say of a good natured woman, that, though she be married to a man and constantly enjoys his embraces, yet she hath a fond kind of longing after him, so hath she always a strong inclination to the God, though she be present and round about him, and though she be impregnated with his most prime and pure particles.

59. But where Typhon falls in and touches upon her extreme parts, it is there she appears melancholy, and is said to mourn, and to look for certain relics and pieces of Osiris, and to array them with all diligence; she receiving all things that die and laying them up within herself, as she again brings forth and sends up out of herself all such things as are produced. And those proportions, forms, and effluxes of the God that are in the heaven and stars do indeed continue always the same; but those that are sown abroad into mutable things, as into land, sea, plants, and animals, are resolved, destroyed, and buried, and afterwards show themselves again very often, and come up anew in several different productions. For which reason the fable makes Typhon to be married to Nephthys, and Osiris to have accompanied with her by stealth. For the utmost and most extreme parts of matter, which they call Nephthys and the end, is mostly under the power of the destructive faculty; but the fecund and salutary power dispenses but a feeble and languid seed into those parts, which is all destroyed by Typhon, except only what Isis taking up doth preserve, cherish, and improve.

60. And in general, Typhon is the prevailing power, as both Plato and Aristotle insinuate. Moreover, the generative and salutary part of nature hath its motion towards him, in order to procure being; but the destroying and corruptive part hath its motion from him, in order to procure not-being. For which reason they call the former part Isis, from going (ἴεσθαι) and being borne-along with knowledge, she being a kind of a living and prudent motion. For her name is not of a barbarous original; but, as all the Gods have one name (θεός) in common, and that is derived from the two words, θέων (running) and θεατός (visible); so also this very Goddess is both from motion and science at once called Isis by us and Isis also by the Egyptians. So likewise Plato tells us, that the ancients called οὐσία (being) ἰσία (knowledge), as also that νόησις (intelligence) and φρόνησις (prudence) had their names given them for being a φορά (agitation) and motion of νοῦς (mind), which was then, as it were, ἱέμενος and φερόμενος (set in motion and borne-along); and the like he affirmeth of συνιέναι (to understand), that it was as much as to say “to be in commotion.”[30] Nay he saith, moreover, that they attribute the very names of ἀγαθόν (good) and ἀρετή (virtue) to the ideas of running (θέω) and of ever-flowing (ἀεὶ ῥέω)[31] which they imply; as likewise, on the other hand again, they used terms opposite to motion by way of reproach; for they called what clogged, tied up, locked up, and confined nature from agitation and motion κακία (baseness or ill motion), ἀπορία (difficulty or difficult motion), δειλία (fearfulness or fearful motion) and ἀνία (sorrow or want of motion).

61. But Osiris had his name from ὅσιος and ἱερός (pious and sacred) compounded; for he is the common idea of things in heaven and things in the lower world, the former of which the ancients thought fit to style ἱερά, and the latter ὅσια. But the principle which discloses things heavenly, and which appertains to things whose motion tends upwards (ἄνω), is called Anubis, and sometimes he is also named Hermanubis, the former name referring to things above, and the latter to things beneath. For which reason they also sacrifice to him two cocks, the one whereof is white and the other of a saffron color, as esteeming the things above to be entire and clear, and the things beneath to be mixed and various. Nor need any one to wonder at the formation of these words from the Grecian tongue; for there are many thousand more of this kind, which, accompanying those who at several times removed out of Greece, do to this very day sojourn and remain among foreigners; some whereof when poetry would bring back into use, it hath been falsely accused of barbarism by those men, who love to call such words strange and outlandish. They say, moreover, that in the so-called books of Hermes there is an account given of the sacred names; and that power which presides over the circulation of the sun is called Horus, and by the Greeks Apollo; and that which is over the winds is by some called Osiris, and by others Serapis, and by others again in the Egyptian tongue Sothi. Now the word Sothi signifies in Greek to breed (κύειν) and breeding; and therefore, by an obliquation of the word κύειν, the star which they account proper to the Goddess Isis is called in Greek κύων, which is as well dog as breeder. And although it be but a fond thing to be over contentious about words, yet I had rather yield to the Egyptians the name of Serapis than that of Osiris, since I account the former to be foreign, and the latter to be Greekish, but believe both to appertain to one God and to one power.

62. And the Egyptian theology seems to favor this opinion. For they oftentimes call Isis by the name of Minerva, which in their language expresseth this sentence, “I came from myself,” and is significative of a motion proceeding from herself. But Typhon is called (as hath been said before) Seth, Bebon, and Smu, which names would insinuate a kind of a forcible restraint, and an opposition or subversion. Moreover, they call the loadstone Horus’s bone, and iron Typhon’s bone, as Manetho relates. For as iron is oftentimes like a thing that is drawn to and follows the loadstone, and oftentimes again flies off and recoils to the opposite part; so the salutary, good, and intelligent motion of the universe doth, as by a gentle persuasion, invert, reduce, and make softer the rugged and Typhonian one; and when again it is restrained and forced back, it returns into itself, and sinks into its former interminateness. Eudoxus also saith that the Egyptian fable of Jupiter is this, that being once unable to go because his legs grew together, he for very shame spent all his time in the wilderness; but that Isis dividing and separating these parts of his body, he came to have the right use of his feet. This fable also hints to us by these words, that the intelligence and reason of the God, which walked before in the unseen and inconspicuous state, came into generation by means of motion.

63. The sistrum likewise (or rattle) doth intimate unto us, that all things ought to be agitated and shook (σείεσθαι), and not to be suffered to rest from their motion, but be as it were roused up and awakened when they begin to grow drowsy and to droop. For they tell us that the sistrum averts and frights away Typhon, insinuating hereby that, as corruption locks up and fixes Nature’s course, so generation again resolves and excites it by means of motion. Moreover, as the sistrum hath its upper part convex, so its circumference contains the four things that are shaken; for that part of the world also which is liable to generation and corruption is contained by the sphere of the moon but all things are moved and changed in it by means of the four elements, fire, earth, water, and air. And upon the upper part of the circumference of the sistrum, on the outside, they set the effigies of a cat carved with a human face; and again, on the under part, below the four jingling things, they set on one side the face of Isis, and on the other the face of Nephthys; symbolically representing by these two faces generation and death (for these are changes and alterations of the elements), and by the cat representing the moon, because of the different colors, the night-motion and the great fecundity of this animal. For they say that she brings forth first one, then two, and three, and four, and five, and so adds one until she comes to seven; so that she brings eight and twenty in all, which are as many as there are days in each moon; but this looks more like a romance. This is certain, that the pupils of her eyes are observed to fill up and grow large upon the full of the moon, and again, to grow less upon its decrease. And the human face of the cat shows how the changes of the moon are governed by mind and reason.

64. To sum up all then in one word, it is not reasonable to believe that either the water or the sun or the earth or the heaven is Osiris or Isis; nor, again, that the fire or the drought or the sea is Typhon; but if we simply ascribe to Typhon whatever in all these is through excesses or defects intemperate or disorderly, and if on the other hand we reverence and honor what in them all is orderly, good, and beneficial, esteeming them the operations of Isis, and as the image, imitation, and discourse of Osiris, we shall not err. And we shall besides take off the incredulity of Eudoxus, who makes a great question how it comes to pass that neither Ceres hath any part in the care of love affairs (but only Isis), nor Bacchus any power either to increase the Nile or to preside over the dead. For we hold that these Gods are set over the whole share of good in common, and that whatever is either good or amiable in Nature is all owing to these, the one yielding the principles, and the other receiving and dispensing them.

65. By this means we shall be able to deal with the vulgar and more importunate sort also, whether their fancy be to accommodate the things that refer to these Gods to those changes which happen to the ambient air at the several seasons of the year, or to production of fruit and to the times of sowing and earing, affirming that Osiris is then buried when the sown corn is covered over by the earth, and that he revives again and re-appears when it begins to sprout. Which they say is the reason that Isis is reported, upon her finding herself to be with child, to have hung a certain amulet or charm about her upon the sixth day of the month Phaophi, and to have been delivered of Harpocrates about the winter solstice, he being in the first shootings and sprouts very imperfect and tender. And this is the reason (say they) that, when the lentils begin to spring up, they offer him their tops for first-fruits. They also observe the festival of her child-birth after the vernal equinox. For they that hear these things are much taken with them and readily give assent to them, and presently infer their credibility from the obviousness and familiarness of the matter.

66. Nor would this be any great harm either, would they save us these Gods in common, and not make them to be peculiar to the Egyptians, nor confine these names to the river Nile, and only to that one piece of ground which the river Nile waters; nor affirm their fens and their lotuses to be the subject of this mythology, and so deprive the rest of mankind of great and mighty Gods, who have neither a Nile nor a Buto nor a Memphis. As for Isis, all mankind have her, and are well acquainted with her and the other Gods about her; and although they had not anciently learned to call some of them by their Egyptian names, yet they from the very first both knew and honored the power which belongs to every one of them. In the second place, what is yet of greater consequence is, that they take a mighty care and fear lest, before they are aware, they change and dissolve the divine beings into blasts of winds, streams of water, sowings of corn, earings of land, accidents of the earth, and changes of seasons; as those who make Bacchus to be wine and Vulcan to be flame. Cleanthes also somewhere saith that Proserpine (or Persephone) is the breath of air which is carried (φερόμενον) through the corn and then dies (φονεύομενον); and again, a certain poet saith of reapers,

For these men seem to me to be nothing wiser than such as would take the sails, the cables, and the anchor of a ship for the pilot; the yarn and the web for the weaver; and the bowl or the mead or the ptisan for the doctor. And they over and above produce in men most dangerous and atheistical opinions, while they give the names of Gods to those natures and things that have in them neither soul nor sense, and that are necessarily destroyed by men who need them and use them.

67. No man can imagine these things can be Gods in themselves. And therefore nothing can be a God to men that is either without soul or under their power. But yet by means of these things we come to think them Gods that use them themselves and bestow them upon us, and that render them perpetual and continual. And those are not some in one country and others in another, nor some Grecians and others barbarians, nor some southern and others northern; but as the sun, moon, land, and sea are common to all men, but yet have different names in different nations, so that one discourse that orders these things, and that one forecast that administers them, and those subordinate powers that are set over every nation in particular, have assigned them by the laws of several countries several kinds of honors and appellations. And those that have been consecrated to their service make use, some of them of darker, and others again of clearer symbols, thereby guiding the understanding to the knowledge of things divine, not without much danger and hazard. For some not being able to reach their true meaning, have slid into downright superstition; and others again, while they would fly the quagmire of superstition, have fallen unwittingly upon the precipice of atheism.

68. And for this reason we should here make most use of the reasonings from philosophy, which introduce us into the knowledge of things sacred, that so we may think piously of whatever is said or acted in religion; lest—as Theodorus once said that, as he reached forth his discourses in his right hand, some of his auditors received them in their left—so what things the laws have wisely constituted about the sacrifices and festivals we should take otherwise than as they are meant, and thereby fall into most dangerous errors and mistakes. That therefore we are to construe all these things by reference to reason, we may easily perceive by the Egyptians themselves. For upon the nineteenth day of the first month they keep a solemn festival to Hermes, wherein they eat honey and figs, and withal say these words, “Truth is a sweet thing.” And that amulet or charm which they fable Isis to hang about her is, when interpreted into our language, “A true voice.” Nor are we to understand Harpocrates to be either some imperfect or infant God, or a God of pulse (as some will have him), but to be the governor and reducer of the tender, imperfect, and inarticulate discourse which men have about the Gods. For which reason, he hath always his finger upon his mouth, as a symbol of talking little and keeping silence. Likewise, upon the month of Mesore, they present him with certain pulse, and pronounce these words: “The tongue is Fortune, the tongue is God.” And of all the plants that Egypt produces, they say the Persea is the most sacred to the Goddess, because its fruit resembles the heart, and its leaf the tongue. For there is nothing that man possesses that is either more divine, or that hath a greater tendency upon happiness, than discourse, and especially that which relates to the Gods. For which reason they lay a strict charge upon such as go down to the oracle there, to have pious thoughts in their hearts and words of good omen in their mouths. But the greater part act ludicrous things in their processions and festivals, first proclaiming good expressions, and then both speaking and thinking words of most wicked and lewd meaning, and that even of the Gods themselves.

69. How then must we manage ourselves at these tetrical, morose, and mournful sacrifices, if we are neither to omit what the laws prescribe us, nor yet to confound and distract our thoughts about the Gods with vain and uncouth surmises? There are among the Greeks also many things done that are like to those which the Egyptians do at their solemnities, and much about the same time too. For at the Thesmophoria at Athens the women fast sitting upon the bare ground. The Boeotians also remove the shrines of Achaea (or Ceres), terming that day the afflictive holiday, because Ceres was then in great affliction for her daughter’s descent into hell. Now upon this month, about the rising of the Pleiades, is the sowing time; and the Egyptians call it Athyr, the Athenians Pyanepsion; and the Boeotians Damatrios (or the month of Ceres). Moreover Theopompus relates, that those that live towards the sun-setting (or the Hesperii) believe the winter to be Saturn, the summer Venus, and the spring time Proserpine; and that they call them by those names, and maintain all to be produced by Saturn and Venus. But the Phrygians, being of opinion that the Deity sleeps in the winter and wakes in the summer, do, in the manner of ecstatics, in the winter time sing lullabies in honor of his sleeping, and in the summer time certain rousing carols in honor of his waking. In like manner the Paphlagonians say, he is bound and imprisoned in the winter, and walks abroad again in the spring and is at liberty.

70. And the nature of the season gives us suspicion that this tetrical sort of service was occasioned by the absenting of the several sorts of fruits at that time of the year; which yet the ancients did not believe to be Gods, but such gifts of the Gods as were both great and necessary in order to preserve them from a savage and bestial life. And at what time they saw both the fruits that came from trees wholly to disappear and fail, and those also which themselves had sown to be yet but starved and poor, they taking up fresh mould in their hands and laying it about their roots, and committing them a second time to the ground with uncertain hopes of their ever coming to perfection or arriving to maturity, did herein many things that might well resemble people at funerals and mourning for the dead. Moreover, as we use to say of one that hath bought the books of Plato, that he hath bought Plato, and of one that hath taken upon him to act the compositions of Menander, that he hath acted Menander; in like manner they did not stick to call the gifts and creatures of the Gods by the names of the Gods themselves, paying this honor and veneration to them for their necessary use. But those of after times receiving this practice unskilfully and ignorantly, applying the accidents of fruits, and the accesses and recesses of things necessary to human life, unto the Gods, did not only call them the generations and deaths of the Gods, but also believed them such, and so filled themselves with abundance of absurd, wicked, and distempered notions; and this, although they had the absurdity of such a monstrous opinion before their very eyes. And therefore Xenophanes the Colophonian might not only put the Egyptians in mind, if they believed those they worshipped to be Gods, not to lament for them, and if they lamented for them, not to believe them to be Gods; but also that it would be extremely ridiculous at one and the same time to lament for the fruits of the earth, and to pray them to appear again and make themselves ripe, that so they may be over again consumed and lamented for.

71. But now this in its true intention is no such thing. But they make their lamentation for the fruits; and their prayers to the Gods, who are the authors and bestowers of those fruits, that they would be pleased to produce and bring up again other new ones in the place of them that are gone. Wherefore it is an excellent saying among philosophers, that they that have not learned the true sense of words will mistake also in the things; as we see those among the Greeks who have not learned nor accustomed themselves to call the brazen and stone statues and the painted representations of the Gods their images or their honors, but the Gods themselves, are so adventurous as to say that Lachares stripped Minerva, that Dionysius cropped off Apollo’s golden locks, and that Jupiter Capitolinus was burned and destroyed in the civil wars of Rome. They therefore, before they are aware, suck in and receive bad opinions with these improper words. And the Egyptians are not the least guilty herein, with respect to the animals which they worship. For the Grecians both speak and think aright in these matters, when they tell us that the pigeon is sacred to Venus, the serpent to Minerva, the raven to Apollo, and the dog to Diana, as Euripides somewhere speaks:

But the greater part of the Egyptians worshipping the very animals themselves, and courting them as Gods, have not only filled their religious worship with matter of scorn and derision (for that would be the least harm that could come of their blockish ignorance); but a dire conception also arises therefrom, which blows up the feeble and simple minded into an extravagance of superstition, and when it lights upon the more subtle and daring tempers, outrages them into atheistical and brutish cogitations. Wherefore it seems not inconsonant here to recount what is probable upon this subject.

72. For that the Gods, being afraid of Typhon, changed themselves into these animals, and did as it were hide themselves in the bodies of ibises, dogs, and hawks, is a foolery beyond all prodigiousness and legend. And that such souls of men departed this life as remain undissolved after death have leave to be reborn into this life by these bodies only, is equally incredible. And of those who would assign some political reason for these things, there are some that affirm that Osiris in his great army, dividing his forces into many parts (which we in Greek call λόχοι and τάξεις), at the same time gave every of them certain ensigns or colors with the shapes of several animals upon them, which in process of time came to be looked upon as sacred, and to be worshipped by the several kindred and clans in that distribution. Others say again, that the kings of after times did, for the greater terror of their enemies, wear about them in their battles the golden and silver heads and upper parts of fierce animals. But there are others that relate that one of these subtle and crafty princes, observing the Egyptians to be of a light and vain disposition and very inclinable to change and innovation, and withal, when sober and unanimous, of an inexpugnable and irrestrainable strength by reason of their mighty numbers, therefore taught them, in their several quarters, a perpetual kind of superstition, to be the ground of endless quarrels and disputes among them. For the various animals which he commanded different cities to observe and reverence being at enmity and war with one another, and desiring one another for food, each party among them being upon the perpetual defence of their proper animals and highly resenting the wrongs that were offered them, it happened that, being thus drawn into the quarrels of their beasts, they were, before they were aware, engaged in hostilities with one another. For at this very day, the Lycopolitans (or Wolf-town-men) are the only people among the Egyptians that eat the sheep, because the wolf, which they esteem to be a God, doth so too. And in our own times, the Oxyrynchites (or those of Pike-town), because the Cynopolitans (or those of Dog-town) did eat a pike, catched the dogs and slew them, and ate of them as they would do of a sacrifice; and there arising a civil war upon it, in which they did much mischief to one another, they were all at last chastised by the Romans.

73. And whereas there are many that say that the soul of Typhon himself took its flight into these animals, this tale may be looked upon to signify that every irrational and brutal nature appertains to the share of the evil Daemon. And therefore, when they would pacify him and speak him fair, they make their court and addresses to these animals. But if there chance to happen a great and excessive drought which, above what is ordinary at other times, brings along with it either wasting diseases or other monstrous and prodigious calamities, the priests then conduct into a dark place, with great silence and stillness, some of the animals which are honored by them; and they first of all menace and terrify them, and if the mischief still continues, they then consecrate and offer them up, looking upon this as a way of punishing the evil God, or at least as some grand purgation in time of greatest disasters. For, as Manetho relateth, they were used in ancient times to burn live men in the city of Ilithyia, entitling them Typhonian; and then they made wind, and dispersed and scattered their ashes into the air. And this was done publicly, and at one only season of the year, which was the dog-days. But those consecrations of the animals worshipped by them which are made in secret, and at irregular and uncertain times of the year as occasions require, are wholly unknown to the vulgar sort, except only at the time of their burials, at which they produce certain other animals, and in the presence of all spectators throw them into the grave with them, thinking by this means to vex Typhon and to abate the satisfaction he received by their deaths. For it is the Apis, with a few more, that is thought sacred to Osiris; but the far greater part are assigned to Typhon. And if this account of theirs be true, I believe it explains the subject of our enquiry as to such animals as are universally received and have their honors in common amongst them all; and of this kind is the ibis, the hawk, the cynocephalos, and the Apis himself; ... for so they call the goat which is kept at Mendes.

74. It remains yet behind, that I treat of their beneficialness to man, and of their symbolical use; and some of them participate of some one of these, and others of both. It is most manifest therefore that they worship the ox, the sheep, and the ichneumon for their benefit and use; as the Lemniotes did the lark, for finding out the locusts’ eggs and breaking them, and the Thessalians the storks, because that, as their soil bred abundance of serpents, they at their appearance destroyed them all, for which reason they enacted a law that whoever killed a stork should be banished the country. Moreover the Egyptians honored the asp, the weasel, and the beetle, observing in them certain dark resemblances of the power of the Gods, like those of the sun in drops of water. For there are many that to this day believe that the weasel engenders by the ear, and brings forth by the mouth, and is therein a resemblance of the production of speech; and that the beetle kind also hath no female, but that the males cast out their sperm into a round pellet of earth, which they roll about by thrusting it backwards with their hinder feet,—and this in imitation of the sun, which, while itself moves from west to east, turns the heaven the contrary way. They also compared the asp to a star, for being always young, and for performing its motions with great ease and glibness, and that without the help of organs.

75. Nor had the crocodile his honor given him without a show of probable reason for it; but it is reported to have been produced by a representation of God, it being the only animal that is without tongue. For the divine discourse hath no need of voice, but “marching by still and silent ways, it guides mortal affairs by equal justice.”[32] Besides, they say he is the only animal that lives in water that hath his eye-sight covered over with a thin and transparent film, descending down from his forehead, so that he sees without being seen himself by others, in which he agrees with the first God. Moreover, in what place soever in the country the female crocodile lays her eggs, that may be certainly concluded to be the utmost extent of the rise of the river Nile for that year. For not being able to lay in the water, and being afraid to lay far from it, they have so exact a knowledge of futurity, that though they enjoy the benefit of the approaching stream at their laying and hatching, they yet preserve their eggs dry and untouched by the water. And they lay sixty in all, and are just as many days a hatching them, and the longest lived of them live as many years; that being the first measure which those that are employed about the heavens make use of. But of those animals that were honored for both reasons, we have already treated of the dog; but now the ibis, besides that he killeth all deadly and poisonous vermin was also the first that taught men the evacuation of the belly by clysters, she being observed to be after this manner washed and purged by herself. Those also of the priests that are the strictest observers of their sacred rites, when they consecrate water for lustration, use to fetch it from some place where the ibis has been drinking; for she will neither taste nor come near any unwholesome or infectious water. Besides, with her two legs standing at large and her bill, she maketh an equilateral triangle; and the speckledness and mixture of her feathers, where there are black ones about the white, signify the gibbousness of the moon on either side.

76. Nor ought we to think it strange that the Egyptians should affect such poor and slender comparisons, when we find the Grecians themselves, both in their pictures and statues, make use of many such resemblances of the Gods as these are. For example, there was in Crete an image of Jupiter having no ears, for he that is commander and chief over all should hear no one. Phidias also set a serpent by the image of Minerva, and a tortoise by that of Venus at Elis, to show that maids needed a guard upon them, and that silence and keeping at home became married women. In like manner the trident of Neptune is a symbol of the third region of the world, which the sea possesses, situated below that of the heaven and air. For which reason they also gave their names to Amphitrite and the Tritons. The Pythagoreans also honored numbers and geometric figures with the names of Gods. For they called an equilateral triangle Minerva Coryphagenes (or crown-born) and Tritogeneia, because it is equally divided by perpendiculars drawn from the three angles. They likewise called the unit Apollo; the number two, contention and also audaciousness; and the number three, justice; for, wronging and being wronged being two extremes caused by deficiency and excess, justice came by equality in the middle. But that which is called the sacred quaternion, being the number thirty-six, was (according to common fame) the greatest oath among them, and was called by them the world, because it is made up of the first four even numbers and the first four odd numbers summed up together.

77. If therefore the most approved of the philosophers did not think meet to pass over or disesteem any significant symbol of the Divinity which they observed even in things that had neither soul nor body, I believe they regarded yet more those properties of government and conduct which they saw in such natures as had sense, and were endued with soul, with passion, and with moral temper. We are not therefore to content ourselves with worshipping these things, but we must worship God through them,—as being the more clear mirrors of him, and produced by Nature,—so as ever worthily to conceive of them as the instruments or artifices of that God which orders all things. And it is reasonable to believe that no inanimate being can be more excellent than an animate one, nor an insensible than a sensible; no, though one should heap together all the gold and emeralds in the universe. For the property of the Divinity consists not in fine colors, shapes, and slicknesses; but, on the contrary, those natures are of a rank below the very dead, that neither did nor ever can partake of life. But now that Nature which hath life and sees, and which hath the source of her motion from her own self, as also the knowledge of things proper and alien to her, hath certainly derived an efflux and a portion of that prudence which (as Heraclitus speaks) considers how the whole universe is governed. Therefore the Deity is no worse represented in these animals, than in the workmanships of copper and stone, which suffer corruptions and decays as well as they, and are besides naturally void of sense and perception. This then is what I esteem the best account that is given of their adoration of animals.

78. As to the sacred vestments, that of Isis is party-colored and of different hues; for her power is about matter, which becomes every thing and receives every thing, as light and darkness, day and night, fire and water, life and death, beginning and ending. But that of Osiris has no shade, no variety of colors, but one only simple one, resembling light. For the first principle is untempered, and that which is first and of an intelligible nature is unmixed; which is the reason why, after they have once made use of this garment, they lay it up and keep it close, invisible and not to be touched. But those of Isis are used often. For sensible things, when they are of daily use and familiar to us, afford us many opportunities to display them and to see them in their various mutations; but the apprehension of what is intelligible, sincere, and holy, darting through the soul like a flash of lightning, attends but to some one single glance or glimpse of its object. For which reason both Plato and Aristotle call this part of philosophy by the name of the epoptic or mysterious part, intimating that those who by help of reason have got beyond these fanciful, mixed, and various things mount up to that first, simple, and immaterial being; and when they have certainly reached the pure truth about it, they believe they have at last attained to complete philosophy.

79. And that which the present priests do darkly hint out and insinuate to us, though with much obscurity, great shyness, and precaution,—that this God is the governor and prince of those that are dead, and that he is no other than he who is called by the Greeks Hades and Pluto,—being not taken in its true sense, disturbs the minds of the greater part, while they suspect that the truly holy and good God Osiris lives within and beneath the earth, where the bodies of those who are supposed to have an end lie hid and buried. But he himself is at the remotest distance from the earth imaginable, being unstained and unpolluted and clean from every substance that is liable to corruption and death. But men’s souls encompassed here with bodies and passions, have no communication with God, except what they can reach to in conception only, by means of philosophy, as by a kind of an obscure dream. But when they are loosed from the body, and removed into the unseen, invisible, impassible, and pure region, this God is then their leader and king; they there as it were hanging on him wholly, and beholding without weariness and passionately affecting that beauty which cannot be expressed or uttered by men. This the Goddess Isis is always caressing, affecting, and enjoying, according to the old tales, and by that means she fills this lower world with all those goodly and excellent things which partake of generation.

80. This then is that account of these things which best suits the nature of the Gods. And if I now must, according to my promise, say something concerning those things they daily offer by way of incense, you are in the first place to understand this, that these people make the greatest account imaginable of all endeavors that relate to health; and more especially in their sacrifices, purgations, and diets, health is no less respected than devotion. For they think it would be an unseemly thing to wait upon that nature that is pure and every way unblemished and untouched, with crazy and diseased minds or bodies. Whereas, therefore, the air that we most use and live in hath not always the same disposition and temperament, but in the night-time grows condense, compresses the body, and contracts the mind into a kind of melancholy and thoughtful habit, it becoming then as it were foggy and dozed, they therefore, as soon as they are up in the morning, burn rosin about them, refreshing and clearing the air by its scattered particles, and fanning up the native spirit of the body, which is now grown languid and dull; this sort of scent having something in it that is very impetuous and striking. And perceiving again at noon-time that the sun hath drawn up by violence a copious and gross exhalation out of the earth, they by censing mix myrrh also with the air; for heat dissolves and dissipates that puddled and slimy vapor which at that time gathers together in the ambient air. And physicians are also found to help pestilential diseases by making great blazes to rarefy the air; but it would be much better rarefied, if they would burn sweet-scented woods, such as cypress, juniper, and pine. And therefore Acron the physician is said to have gained a mighty reputation at Athens, in the time of the great plague, by ordering people to make fires near to the sick; for not a few were benefited by it. Aristotle likewise saith that the odoriferous exhalations of perfumes, flowers, and sweet meadows are no less conducing to health than to pleasure; for that their warmth and delicacy of motion gently relax the brain, which is of its own nature cold and clammy. And if it be true that the Egyptians in their language call myrrh bal, and that the most proper signification of that word is scattering away idle talk, this also adds some testimony to our account of the reason why they burn it.

81. Moreover, that they call Kyphi is a kind of a composition made up of sixteen ingredients, that is, of honey, wine, raisins, cyperus, rosin, myrrh, aspalathus, seseli, mastich, bitumen, nightshade, and dock; to which they add the berries of both the junipers (the one whereof they call the greater, and the other the lesser sort), as also calamus and cardamom. Neither do they put them together slightly or at a random rate; but the sacred books are read to the perfumers all the while they are compounding them. As for the number of the ingredients (sixteen),—although it may appear important, being the square of a square, and making the only square surface which has a periphery equal to its area,—yet I must needs say that this contributes but very little here. But it is the contained species (most of which are of aromatic properties) that send up a sweet fume and an agreeable exhalation, by which the air is changed; and the body, being moved by the breath, sinks into a calm and gentle sleep, and retains a temperament conducive to sleep; and without the disorders of drunkenness, as it were, it loosens and unties, like a sort of knots, the doziness and intenseness of the thoughts by day-time; and the fantastic part and that which is receptive of dreams it wipes like a mirror and renders clearer, with no less efficacy than those strokes of the harp which the Pythagoreans made use of before they went to sleep, to charm and allay the distempered and irrational part of the soul. For we find that strong scents many times call back the failing sense, but sometimes dull and obstruct it, their wasted parts diffusing themselves by their great fineness and subtilty through the whole body; like as some physicians tell us that sleep is produced when the fumes of meat, by creeping gently about the inwards, and as it were groping every part, cause a certain soft titillation.

They also use this Kyphi both for a drink and for a medicinal potion; for when drunk it is found to cleanse the inwards, it being a loosener of the belly. Besides all this, rosin is the creature of the sun, and they gather myrrh as the trees weep it out by moonlight; but now of those ingredients that make up Kyphi, there are some that delight more in the night, as those whose nature it is to be nourished by cool blasts, shades, dews, and humidities. For the light of day is one thing and simple; and Pindar saith, the sun is then seen

But the air of night is a kind of composition; for it is made up of many lights and powers, which, like so many several seeds, flow down from every star into one place. They therefore very pertinently cense the former things by day-time, as being simples and deriving their original from the sun; and the latter at the entrance of the night, they being mixed and of many and different qualities.