Note 67 — Chapter XI

The biographer of Apollonius of Tyana records the following conversation. ‘The beasts and birds,’ says Apollonius, ‘may derive dignity from such representations, but the gods will lose theirs.’ ‘I think,’ says his opponent, ‘you slight our mode of worship before you have given it a fair examination. For surely what we are speaking of is wise, if anything Egyptian is so; the Egyptians do not venture to give any form to their deities, they only give them in symbols which have an occult meaning, that renders them venerable.’ Apollonius, however, is not convinced: he admits that the mind forms to itself an idea which it pictures better than any art can do, but he complains that the Egyptian custom takes from the gods the very power of appearing beautiful either to the eye or to the mind. Porphyry also regards the worship as symbolic; he says that ‘under the semblance of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature.’ These quotations and those in the text are taken from Le Page Renout’s Hibbert Lectures.