"There exists a luminous, igneous, subtile fluid, which under the name of ether and spiritus, fills the universe.
It is the essential principle and agent of motion and life, it is the Deity. When an earthly body is to be animated, a small round particle of this fluid gravitates through the milky way towards the lunar sphere; where, when it arrives, it unites with a grosser air, and becomes fit to a.s.sociate with matter: it then enters and entirely fills the body, animates it, suffers, grows, increases, and diminishes with it; lastly, when the body dies, and its gross elements dissolve, this incorruptible particle takes its leave of it, and returns to the grand ocean of ether, if not retained by its union with the lunar air: it is this air or gas, which, retaining the shape of the body, becomes a phantom or ghost, the perfect representation of the deceased. The Greeks called this phantom the image or idol of the soul; the Pythagoreans, its chariot, its frame; and the Rabbinical school, its vessel, or boat. When a man had conducted himself well in this world, his whole soul, that is its chariot and ether, ascended to the moon, where a separation took place: the chariot lived in the lunar Elysium, and the ether returned to the fixed sphere, that is, to G.o.d: for the fixed heaven, says Macrobius, was by many called by the name of G.o.d (c. 14). If a man had not lived virtuously, the soul remained on earth to undergo purification, and was to wander to and fro, like the ghosts of Homer, to whom this doctrine must have been known, since he wrote after the time of Pherecydes and Pythagoras, who were its promulgators in Greece. Herodotus upon this occasion says, that the whole romance of the soul and its transmigrations was invented by the Egyptians, and propagated in Greece by men, who pretended to be its authors. I know their names, adds he, but shall not mention them (lib. 2). Cicero, however, has positively informed us, that it was Pherecydes, master of Pythagoras. Tuscul. lib. 1, sect. 16. Now admitting that this system was at that period a novelty, it accounts for Solomon"s treating it as a fable, who lived 130 years before Pherecydes. "Who knoweth," said he, "the spirit of a man that it goeth upwards? I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that G.o.d might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity."" Eccles. c.
iii: v. 18.
And such had been the opinion of Moses, as a translator of Herodotus (M. Archer of the Academy of Inscriptions) justly observes in note 389 of the second book; where he says also that the immortality of the soul was not introduced among the Hebrews till their intercourse with the a.s.syrians. In other respects, the whole Pythagorean system, properly a.n.a.lysed, appears to be merely a system of physics badly understood.
"Hence, also its transmigrations, known by the name of metempsychosis, that is, the pa.s.sage of the vital principle from one body to another; an idea which arose from the real transmigration of the material elements.
And behold, ye Indians, ye Boudhists, ye Christians, ye Mussulmans!
whence are derived all your opinions on the spirituality of the soul; behold what was the source of the dreams of Pythagoras and Plato, your masters, who were themselves but the echoes of another, the last sect of visionary philosophers, which we will proceed to examine.
VIII. Eighth system. The WORLD-MACHINE: Worship of the Demi-Ourgos, or Grand Artificer.
"Hitherto the theologians, employing themselves in examining the fine and subtile substances of ether or the generating fire, had not, however, ceased to treat of beings palpable and perceptible to the senses; and theology continued to be the theory of physical powers, placed sometimes exclusively in the stars, and sometimes disseminated through the universe; but at this period, certain superficial minds, losing the chain of ideas which had directed them in their profound studies, or ignorant of the facts on which they were founded, distorted all the conclusions that flowed from them by the introduction of a strange and novel chimera. They pretended that this universe, these heavens, these stars, this sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary machine; and applying to this first hypothesis a comparison drawn from the works of art, they raised an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms.
A machine, said they, does not make itself; it has had an anterior workman; its very existence proves it. The world is a machine; therefore it had an artificer.*
* All the arguments of the spiritualists are founded on this. See Macrobius, at the end of the second book, and Plato, with the comments of Marcilius Ficinus.
"Here, then, is the Demi-Ourgos or grand artificer, const.i.tuted G.o.d autocratical and supreme. In vain the ancient philosophy objected to this by saying that the artificer himself must have had parents and progenitors; and that they only added another step to the ladder by taking eternity from the world, and giving it to its supposed author.
The innovators, not content with this first paradox, pa.s.sed on to a second; and, applying to their artificer the theory of the human understanding, they pretended that the Demi-Ourgos had framed his machine on a plan already existing in his understanding. Now, as their masters, the naturalists, had placed in the regions of the fixed stars the great primum mobile, under the name of intelligence and reason, so their mimics, the spiritualists, seizing this idea, applied it to their Demi-Ourgos, and making it a substance distinct and self-existent, they called it mens or logos (reason or word). And, as they likewise admitted the existence of the soul of the world, or solar principle, they found themselves obliged to compose three grades of divine beings, which were: first, the Demi-Ourgos, or working G.o.d; secondly, the logos, word or reason; thirdly, the spirit or soul (of the world).* And here, Christians! is the romance on which you have founded your trinity; here is the system which, born a heretic in the temples of Egypt, transported a pagan into the schools of Greece and Italy, is now found to be good, catholic, and orthodox, by the conversion of its partisans, the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, to Christianity.
* These are the real types of the Christian Trinity.
"It is thus that G.o.d, after having been, First, The visible and various action of the meteors and the elements;
"Secondly, The combined powers of the stars, considered in their relations to terrestrial beings;
Thirdly, These terrestrial beings themselves, by confounding the symbols with their archetypes;
Fourthly, The double power of nature in its two princ.i.p.al operations of producing and destroying;
"Fifthly, The animated world, with distinction of agent and patient, of effect and cause;
"Sixthly, The solar principle, or the element of fire considered as the only mover;
"Has thus become, finally, in the last resort, a chimerical and abstract being, a scholastic subtilty, of substance without form, a body without a figure, a very delirium of the mind, beyond the power of reason to comprehend. But vainly does it seek in this last transformation to elude the senses; the seal of its origin is imprinted upon it too deep to be effaced; and its attributes, all borrowed from the physical attributes of the universe, such as immensity, eternity, indivisibility, incomprehensibility; or on the moral affections of man, such as goodness, justice, majesty; its names* even, all derived from the physical beings which were its types, and especially from the sun, from the planets, and from the world, constantly bring to mind, in spite of its corrupters, indelible marks of its real nature.
* In our last a.n.a.lysis we found all the names of the Deity to be derived from some material object in which it was supposed to reside. We have given a considerable number of instances; let us add one more relative to our word G.o.d.
This is known to be the Deus of the Latins, and the Theos of the Greeks. Now by the confession of Plato (in Cratylo), of Macrobius (Saturn, lib. 1, c. 24,) and of Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) its root is thein, which signifies to wander, like planein, that is to say, it is synonymous with planets; because, add our authors, both the ancient Greeks and Barbarians particularly worshipped the planets. I know that such enquiries into etymologies have been much decried: but if, as is the case, words are the representative signs of ideas, the genealogy of the one becomes that of the other, and a good etymological dictionary would be the most perfect history of the human understanding. It would only be necessary in this enquiry to observe certain precautions, which have hitherto been neglected, and particularly to make an exact comparison of the value of the letters of the different alphabets. But, to continue our subject, we shall add, that in the Phoenician language, the word thah (with ain) signifies also to wander, and appears to be the derivation of thein. If we suppose Deus to be derived from the Greek Zeus, a proper name of You-piter, having zaw, I live, for its root, its sense will be precisely that of you, and will mean soul of the world, igneous principle. (See note p. 143). Div-us, which only signifies Genius, G.o.d of the second order, appears to me to come from the oriental word div subst.i.tuted for dib, wolf and chacal, one of the emblems of the sun. At Thebes, says Macrobius, the sun was painted under the form of a wolf or chacal, for there are no wolves in Egypt. The reason of this emblem, doubtless, is that the chacal, like the c.o.c.k announces by its cries the sun"s rising; and this reason is confirmed by the a.n.a.logy of the words lykos, wolf, and lyke, light of the morning, whence comes lux.
Dius, which is to be understood also of the sun, must be derived from dih, a hawk. "The Egyptians," says Porphyry (Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 92,) "represent the sun under the emblem of a hawk, because this bird soars to the highest regions of air where light abounds." And in reality we continually see at Cairo large flights of these birds, hovering in the air, from whence they descend not but to stun us with their shrieks, which are like the monosyllable dih: and here, as in the preceding example, we find an a.n.a.logy between the word dies, day, light, and dius, G.o.d, sun.
"Such is the chain of ideas which the human mind had already run through at an epoch previous to the records of history; and since their continuity proves that they were the produce of the same series of studies and labors, we have every reason to place their origin in Egypt, the cradle of their first elements. This progress there may have been rapid; because the physical priests had no other food, in the retirement of the temples, but the enigma of the universe, always present to their minds; and because in the political districts into which that country was for a long time divided, every state had its college of priests, who, being by turns auxiliaries or rivals, hastened by their disputes the progress of science and discovery.*
* One of the proofs that all these systems were invented in Egypt, is that this is the only country where we see a complete body of doctrine formed from the remotest antiquity.
Clemens Alexandrinus has transmitted to us (Stromat. lib.
6,) a curious detail of the forty-two volumes which were borne in the procession of Isis. "The priest," says he, "or chanter, carries one of the symbolic instruments of music, and two of the books of Mercury; one containing hymns of the G.o.ds, the other the list of kings. Next to him the horoscope (the regulator of time,) carries a palm and a dial, symbols of astrology; he must know by heart the four books of Mercury which treat of astrology: the first on the order of the planets, the second on the risings of the sun and moon, and the two last on the rising and aspect of the stars. Then comes the sacred author, with feathers on his head (like Kneph) and a book in his hand, together with ink, and a reed to write with, (as is still the practice among the Arabs). He must be versed in hieroglyphics, must understand the description of the universe, the course of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, be acquainted with the division of Egypt into thirty-six nomes, with the course of the Nile, with instruments, measures, sacred ornaments, and sacred places. Next comes the stole bearer, who carries the cubit of justice, or measure of the Nile, and a cup for the libations; he bears also in the procession ten volumes on the subject of sacrifices, hymns, prayers, offerings, ceremonies, festivals. Lastly arrives the prophet, bearing in his bosom a pitcher, so as to be exposed to view; he is followed by persons carrying bread (as at the marriage of Cana.) This prophet, as president of the mysteries, learns ten other sacred volumes, which treat of the laws, the G.o.ds, and the discipline of the priests. Now there are in all forty-two volumes, thirty-six of which are studied and got by heart by these personages, and the remaining six are set apart to be consulted by the pastoph.o.r.es; they treat of medicine, the construction of the human body (anatomy), diseases, remedies, instruments, etc., etc."
We leave the reader to deduce all the consequences of an Encyclopedia. It is ascribed to Mercury; but Jamblicus tells us that each book, composed by priests, was dedicated to that G.o.d, who, on account of his t.i.tle of genius or decan opening the zodiac, presided over every enterprise. He is the Ja.n.u.s of the Romans, and the Guianesa of the Indians, and it is remarkable that Ya.n.u.s and Guianes are h.o.m.onymous.
In short it appears that these books are the source of all that has been transmitted to us by the Greeks and Latins in every science, even in alchymy, necromancy, etc. What is most to be regretted in their loss is that part which related to the principles of medicine and diet, in which the Egyptians appear to have made a considerable progress, and to have delivered many useful observations.
"There happened early on the borders of the Nile, what has since been repeated in every country; as soon as a new system was formed its novelty excited quarrels and schisms; then, gaining credit by persecution itself, sometimes it effaced antecedent ideas, sometimes it modified and incorporated them; then, by the intervention of political revolutions, the aggregation of states and the mixture of nations confused all opinions; and the filiation of ideas being lost, theology fell into a chaos, and became a mere logogriph of old traditions no longer understood. Religion, having strayed from its object was now nothing more than a political engine to conduct the credulous vulgar; and it was used for this purpose, sometimes by men credulous themselves and dupes of their own visions, and sometimes by bold and energetic spirits in pursuit of great objects of ambition.
IX. Religion of Moses, or Worship of the Soul of the World (You-piter).
"Such was the legislator of the Hebrews; who, wishing to separate his nation from all others, and to form a distinct and solitary empire, conceived the design of establishing its basis on religious prejudices, and of raising around it a sacred rampart of opinions and of rites. But in vain did he prescribe the worship of the symbols which prevailed in lower Egypt and in Phoenicia;* for his G.o.d was nevertheless an Egyptian G.o.d, invented by those priests of whom Moses had been the disciple; and Yahouh,** betrayed by its very name, essence (of beings), and by its symbol, the burning bush, is only the soul of the world, the moving principle which the Greeks soon after adopted under the same denomination in their you-piter, regenerating being, and under that of Ei, existence,*** which the Thebans consecrated by the name of Kneph, which Sais worshipped under the emblem of Isis veiled, with this inscription: I am al that has been, all that is, and all that is to come, and no mortal has raised my veil; which Pythagoras honored under the name of Vesta, and which the stoic philosophy defined precisely by calling it the principle of fire. In vain did Moses wish to blot from his religion every thing which had relation to the stars; many traits call them to mind in spite of all he has done. The seven planetary luminaries of the great candlestick; the twelve stones, or signs in the Urim of the high priests; the feast of the two equinoxes, (entrances and gates of the two hemispheres); the ceremony of the lamb, (the celestial ram then in his fifteenth degree); lastly, the name even of Osiris preserved in his song,**** and the ark, or coffer, an imitation of the tomb in which that G.o.d was laid, all remain as so many witnesses of the filiation of his ideas, and of their extraction from the common source.
* "At a certain period," says Plutarch (de Iside) "all the Egyptians have their animal G.o.ds painted. The Thebans are the only people who do not employ painters, because they worship a G.o.d whose form comes not under the senses, and cannot be represented." And this is the G.o.d whom Moses, educated at Heliopolis, adopted; but the idea was not of his invention.
** Such is the true p.r.o.nunciation of the Jehovah of the moderns, who violate, in this respect, every rule of criticism; since it is evident that the ancients, particularly the eastern Syrians and Phoenicians, were acquainted neither with the J nor the P which are of Tartar origin. The subsisting usage of the Arabs, which we have re-established here, is confirmed by Diodorus, who calls the G.o.d of Moses Iaw, (lib. 1), and Iaw and Yahouh are manifestly the same word: the ident.i.ty continues in that of You-piter; but in order to render it more complete, we shall demonstrate the signification to be the same.
In Hebrew, that is to say, in one of the dialects of the common language of lower Asia, Yahouh is the participle of the verb hih, to exist, to be, and signifies existing: in other words, the principle of life, the mover or even motion (the universal soul of beings). Now what is Jupiter? Let us hear the Greeks and Latins explain their theology. "The Egyptians," says Diodorus, after Manatho, priest of Memphis, "in giving names to the five elements, called spirit, or ether, You-piter, on account of the true meaning of that word: for spirit is the source of life, author of the vital principle in animals; and for this reason they considered him as the father, the generator of beings." For the same reason Homer says, father, and king of men and G.o.ds. (Diod.
lib. 1, sect 1).
"Theologians," says Macrobius, "consider You-piter as the soul of the world." Hence the words of Virgil: " Muses let us begin with You-piter; the world is full of You-piter."
(Somn. Scrip., ch. 17). And in the Saturnalia, he says, "Jupiter is the sun himself." It was this also which made Virgil say, "The spirit nourishes the life (of beings), and the soul diffused through the vast members (of the universe), agitates the whole ma.s.s, and forms but one immense body."
"Ioupiter," says the ancient verses of the Orphic sect, which originated in Egypt; verses collected by Onomacritus in the days of Pisistratus, "Ioupiter, represented with the thunder in his hand, is the beginning, origin, end, and middle of all things: a single and universal power, he governs every thing; heaven, earth, fire, water, the elements, day, and night. These are what const.i.tute his immense body: his eyes are the sun and moon: he is s.p.a.ce and eternity: in fine," adds Porphyry. "Jupiter is the world, the universe, that which const.i.tutes the essence and life of all beings. Now," continues the same author, "as philosophers differed in opinion respecting the nature and const.i.tuent parts of this G.o.d, and as they could invent no figure that should represent all his attributes, they painted him in the form of a man. He is in a sitting posture, in allusion to his immutable essence; the upper part of his body is uncovered, because it is in the upper regions of the universe (the stars) that he most conspicuously displays himself. He is covered from the waist downwards, because respecting terrestrial things he is more secret and concealed. He holds a scepter in his left hand, because on the left side is the heart, and the heart is the seat of the understanding, which, (in human beings) regulates every action." Euseb. Proeper. Evang., p 100.
The following pa.s.sage of the geographer and philosopher, Strabo, removes every doubt as to the ident.i.ty of the ideas of Moses and those of the heathen theologians.
"Moses, who was one of the Egyptian priests, taught his followers that it was an egregious error to represent the Deity under the form of animals, as the Egyptians did, or in the shape of man, as was the practice of the Greeks and Africans. That alone is the Deity, said he, which const.i.tutes heaven, earth, and every living thing; that which we call the world, the sum of all things, nature; and no reasonable person will think of representing such a being by the image of any one of the objects around us. It is for this reason, that, rejecting every species of images or idols, Moses wished the Deity to be worshipped without emblems, and according to his proper nature; and he accordingly ordered a temple worthy of him to be erected, etc. Geograph. lib. 16, p. 1104, edition of 1707.
The theology of Moses has, then, differed in no respect from that of his followers, that is to say, from that of the Stoics and Epicureans, who consider the Deity as the soul of the world. This philosophy appears to have taken birth, or to have been disseminated when Abraham came into Egypt (200 years before Moses), since he quitted his system of idols for that of the G.o.d Yahouh; so that we may place its promulgation about the seventeenth or eighteenth century before Christ; which corresponds with what we have said before.
As to the history of Moses, Diodorus properly represents it when he says, lib. 34 and 40, "That the Jews were driven out of Egypt at a time of dearth, when the country was full of foreigners, and that Moses, a man of extraordinary prudence seized this opportunity of establishing his religion in the mountains of Judea." It will seem paradoxical to a.s.sert, that the 600,000 armed men whom he conducted thither ought to be reduced to 6,000; but I can confirm the a.s.sertion by so many proofs drawn from the books themselves, that it will be necessary to correct an error which appears to have arisen from the mistake of the transcribers.
*** This was the monosyllable written on the gates of the temple of Delphos. Plutarch has made it the subject of a dissertation.
**** These are the literal expressions of the book of Deuteronomy, chap. x.x.xII. "The works of Tsour are perfect."
Now Tsour has been translated by the word creator; its proper signification is to give forms, and this is one of the definitions of Osiris in Plutarch.
X. Religion of Zoroaster.
"Such also was Zoroaster; who, five centuries after Moses, and in the time of David, revived and moralized among the Medes and Bactrians, the whole Egyptian system of Osiris and Typhon, under the names Ormuzd and Ahrimanes; who called the reign of summer, virtue and good; the reign of winter, sin and evil; the renewal of nature in spring, creation of the world; the conjunction of the spheres at secular periods, resurrection; and the Tartarus and Elysium of the astrologers and geographers were named future life, h.e.l.l and paradise. In a word, he did nothing but consecrate the existing dreams of the mystical system.
XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans.
"Such again are the propagators of the dismal doctrine of the Samaneans; who, on the basis of the Metempsychosis, have erected the misanthropic system of self-denial, and of privations; who, laying it down as a principle that the body is only a prison where the soul lives in an impure confinement, that life is only a dream, an illusion, and the world only a pa.s.sage to another country, to a life without end, placed virtue and perfection in absolute immobility, in the destruction of all sentiment, in the abnegation of physical organs, in the annihilation of all our being; whence resulted fasts, penances, macerations, solitude, contemplations, and all the practices of the deplorable delirium of the Anchorites.