Clavis Mythologiarum

THE KEY TO ALL MYTHOLOGIES.

BY THE REV. EDWARD CASAUBON, RECTOR OF LOWICK.

VOL. I. LONDON: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR. 1831.

POSTERITATI HOC OPUS QUALECUMQUE, TRIGINTA ANNORUM LABOREM, D. D. D. E. C.1

PREFACE.

×The work of which the first volume is here laid before the public has been in preparation, with such intermissions as the duties of my station and the infirmities of health have from time to time imposed, during a period of not less than thirty years; and it would be affectation in me to pretend that I am indifferent to the reception which it may meet with, or that I am unaware of the disadvantages under which a work so long announced and so long deferred must necessarily come before those who have been accustomed to measure the industry of an author by the frequency of his publications. The earliest of the collections from which it has been formed were made at a time when the inquiry had scarcely assumed any definite shape in my own mind, and consisted of little more than the entering of particular places, as they occurred in the course of my reading, under the heads to which they appeared to belong, without any attempt to determine their bearing upon one another; and it was not until many years had elapsed that the theses which the reader will find enumerated in the Introduction began to present themselves to me as the principles by which the whole might be reduced to order.2 NB-03-014 NB-04-010

○I am aware that the delay has been the occasion of some remark, and that it has been represented, by persons who have not been at the pains to inform themselves of the nature of the undertaking, as the consequence either of indolence or of a want of confidence in the conclusions at which I had arrived. It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other. To such persons it would be useless to explain that a work which undertakes to classify the testimonies of every nation among which the primitive tradition can be traced, and to determine, in each instance, the mode by which it was corrupted, is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of those who suppose that a theory may be established by being asserted; and to others it will, I trust, be unnecessary.3 NB-36-004 NB-03-014

○It remains only to say a word respecting the form in which the work is presented. The present volume contains the Introduction, in which the theses are enumerated as they are at present sketched, the five Books in which the four modes of corruption are severally examined, and two excursuses upon the island of Crete; and it is followed by an appendix, in which I have thought it right to notice certain objections which have lately been urged against my method in a publication to which I shall there refer. The illustration of some of the heads is fuller than that of others, the materials which antiquity has left us being unequal; and the reader who desires to examine any testimony at greater length will find it in its place among the collections, which have been arranged in a series of volumes, with a volume of contents by which they may be consulted. In the arrangement and transcription of the later collections I have had the assistance of an amanuensis, whose labours, under my direction, have materially abridged my own; and I have had the satisfaction of laying before the public, in the course of the preparation of the present work, a tractate upon the Egyptian Mysteries, of which the substance is incorporated in the fifth Book.4 NB-58-008 NB-44-039

Footnotes

  1. "To posterity this work, such as it is, the labour of thirty years, E. C. gives, devotes and dedicates." The dedication is not addressed to Carp (Testimonia 24); "thirty years of preparation" is the novel's phrase (Testimonia 30). The second paragraph of the Preface repeats, in its second sentence and in its last, words Casaubon speaks to Dorothea in Rome (Testimonia 19). ↩

  2. The earliest of the collections, upon the idols of the Philistines, belongs to the first years of the inquiry; the place of the sacred text from which it begins (1 Sam. v. 2–5) is examined in the second head of the fourth Book, together with the second place in which the same deity is named (Judg. xvi. 23). ↩

  3. I do not name the persons to whom I refer, and I do not suppose that any of them will be at a loss to recognise himself. For the manner in which a single head of the inquiry has been conducted, from the first entering of a place to the statement of the view which it supports, the reader may consult the head of Dagon, in the fourth Book. ↩

  4. The tractate was printed in the year preceding the present volume. The testimony of Iamblichus (Iambl. de Myst. sect. i. cap. 1), and the opinion of the late Bishop of Gloucester which it was employed to correct (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4), are there examined at length. ↩

INTRODUCTION: THE THESES, AS AT PRESENT SKETCHED. →