INTRODUCTION. HEAD V. OF THE FABLE OF THE POETS, AS DISTINGUISHED FROM TRADITION.

×It were premature, in an Introduction which has for its object the indication of the rule rather than its application, to do more under the present head than to set down, with such brevity as the subject admits, the grounds upon which the relation of a poet is to be distinguished from the tradition of a people; to examine, for that purpose, three testimonies of Plutarch and one of Macrobius; and to defer to the heads in which the several deities are treated the application of the rule to each instance in which it is to be applied. I do not propose, as I have already said, to exclude the poets from the inquiry altogether; I propose that their testimony shall be admitted so far as it can be shewn to be the testimony of a people, and no farther.¹ NB-15-003

×The first testimony is that of Plutarch, in the treatise upon Isis and Osiris, where he speaks of the tales which the Egyptians relate of their gods. He declares, in substance, that when the reader hears the tales which the Egyptians relate, of the wanderings of the gods, and of their dismemberments, and of such like disasters that befell them, he is to remember that none of these things has been really so acted and done as it is told; and he adds, by way of illustration, that the Egyptians do not call the dog Hermes properly, but attribute to the most knowing of the gods the vigilance and acuteness of that animal.² The testimony is of consequence for two reasons: it is, in the first place, the testimony of a heathen writer who had the relations before him, and who neither supposes them to have been history nor asks that they should be believed; and it is, in the second, a report of what the Egyptians themselves intend by their tales, and not an opinion of Plutarch's concerning them. What he substitutes in the place of the letter I have not here set down, the examples which follow in the same place belonging to another head; it is enough for the present that the letter of the fable was disowned by those who kept it.³ NB-15-003

○The second testimony is of a different order, and is not to be confounded with the first. Plutarch relates that the order of the Egyptian priests, into which a man was admitted who was chosen from among the soldiery, was admitted to a philosophy whose genius it was to conceal the greater part in tales and romantic relations, containing obscure intimations and resemblances of the truth; and he adds that the Sphinxes which were set up before the temples were intended to show that the theology of the order was a learning of that enigmatical kind. He adds also that the temple of Minerva at Sais, whom the Egyptians look upon as the same with Isis, bore an inscription which declares that the goddess is whatever was, or is, or will be, and that her veil no mortal ever took up.⁴ The fables of the Egyptians, as Plutarch gives the matter, are therefore not the doctrine but the covering of it; and this is to be classed with the fable which a priesthood makes of what it keeps, and is to be distinguished from the fable of the poets, who tell what they have received without the knowledge of what lies under it. What was under the veil of the goddess at Sais the inscription does not say, and Plutarch does not here undertake to say. NB-44-014 NB-15-003

×The third testimony is that of Macrobius, in the first book of the Saturnalia (the feast of Saturn), in which Praetextatus, replying to Avienus, affirms that the company of the poets, when they tell tales of the gods, "borrow their seeds from the sanctuaries of philosophy" for the most part, and that the reference of almost all the gods to the sun is not a vain superstition but a divine reason.⁵ That the poets embroidered I do not doubt; and what is embroidered is to be set aside as literary fable. But that the seed itself was philosophy is the very question; it is here assumed, and not shewn. A relation kept in the temples, and repeated by the nations, is a tradition; the philosophers who came after found it laid up, and gave it a reason; the reason is theirs, and the tradition was before it. It is to be inquired whether Praetextatus has not put the second thing for the first; and the inquiry, since it concerns every deity whom he reduces to the sun, belongs to the first head of the second Book, where the place is to be examined in its connexion.⁶ NB-20-012

×The fourth testimony, which I take as an instance of the application of the rule, is the relation which Plutarch gives of the father of Isis. He reports, without choosing between them, that many have reported her the daughter of Hermes and many of Prometheus; assigning to the first the authorship of letters and music, and to the second that of wit and forecast.⁷ It is a report of what is said, and Plutarch does not say which of the two he holds. Mr. Bryant numbers both Hermes and Prometheus among the titles under which, as he says, "the history of the Patriarch was recorded by the ancients through their whole theology"; and if he be right, the two companies of Plutarch's many are divided over one person under two names.⁸ That, however, follows from Mr. Bryant's position, and is not in Plutarch, who gives two fathers with a gift to each; and which is the case the testimony does not determine. The genealogy is therefore entered under fable, as one which Plutarch himself reports only as said, and which no people is shewn to have delivered; and it is not to be employed as tradition until it is shewn, by some other testimony, to have been so. NB-12-009

○The rule, as at present sketched, may now be stated in these terms: a relation which a people keeps, which is repeated in its rites, and which is disowned in its letter by those who keep it, is tradition, and is to be received as such, with whatever it covers; a relation which bears upon its face the marks of a particular composition and of a particular purpose, or which is reported by a writer as said by many without being delivered by any, is fable, and is to be set aside, however ancient its author and however considerable his name. The priests' tales, as Plutarch describes them, fall under the first head, since they are the covering of what the order kept; the tales of the poets, who received without knowing what they received, under the second. The application of the rule to a particular instance may in some cases be doubtful, and I do not pretend that every relation will fall plainly under the one head or under the other; but the rule is not the less to be observed on that account, and the doubtful instances are to be marked as such where they occur.⁹ NB-15-003 NB-44-014 NB-20-012 NB-12-009

○It may be objected, in the first place, that the rule deprives the argument of its most ancient witnesses, the poets being, in the greater number of instances, the earliest authors in whom the relations are found; to which I answer that the antiquity of a writer is not the antiquity of his matter, and that a relation is not the more a tradition for having been composed early. It may be objected, in the second place, that the line between the covering which a priesthood makes and the fable which a poet makes is not so clearly drawn as I have supposed, since the poet may have received his matter from the priest; to which I answer that this is not improbable, and that it is for that reason that the poet's testimony is to be admitted so far as it can be shewn to be the testimony of a people. It may be objected, lastly, that the disowning of the letter by those who kept the tales, which is the foundation of the first part of the rule, is the testimony of a single writer, and that a single writer is not to be set against the common belief; to which I answer that the testimony is not offered against the common belief, but as evidence of what the keepers of the tales intended, and that this objection, with others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length under the several heads, and in particular under that of the Mysteries.¹⁰ NB-15-003 NB-44-014 NB-20-012 NB-12-009