INTRODUCTION: THE THESES, AS AT PRESENT SKETCHED.

○It is the design of the present work, which the reader will not, I trust, regard as the less deserving of his patience because it is laid before him in a form that is necessarily provisional, to show that the various systems of fable which have prevailed among the nations of the heathen world, and which it has been usual to treat either as the inventions of poets, or as the disguises of philosophers, or (by a class of writers whom it is not necessary at present to name) as the spontaneous productions of an untutored imagination, are in truth so many corruptions of one deposit, delivered to the first men, carried abroad at the Dispersion, and obscured, in the several nations among which it was dispersed, by certain modes of corruption which it will be the business of the following pages to distinguish, and of which the number is not, as might be supposed, indefinite, but fixed.¹ Of this design I propose, in the present Introduction, to do no more than to enumerate the theses of which it consists, as they are at present sketched, deferring the proof of each to the head under which it properly falls, and reserving to the same place the consideration of those objections which, although I do not affect to underrate them, would, if they were considered here, anticipate an order of exposition upon which the force of the whole in no small degree depends. NB-36-009 NB-04-002 NB-10-006

○The first thesis is, that there was delivered to the first men a revelation, of one Creator, of a Fall, of sacrifice, of a Deliverer promised, and of the Deluge; and that this deposit, and not the observation of nature, nor the fears of the vulgar, nor the craft of the legislator, is the seed of all tradition. In support of this thesis it will not be required, nor indeed would it be possible, to produce any single testimony in which the whole deposit is found entire among the heathen; for if it were so found, it would not have been corrupted, and the inquiry would be without an object. What will be required is the concurrence of many partial testimonies, each preserving some part of the deposit in a form more or less obscured; and the first of these, in the order of exposition though not of time, is the confession of the Greeks themselves that they received the names of nearly all their gods from a people older than themselves, who were not, upon their own showing, the authors of them.² NB-10-006 NB-04-002 NB-47-015

×The second thesis is, that the deposit was carried abroad at the Dispersion, and was corrupted chiefly in the line of Ham, through Cush and Mizraim; and not, as Mr. Bryant supposes, through the sons of Cush alone. Upon this thesis, which may appear to some to be no more than a correction of detail in the system of a writer whose general merits are not in dispute, it will be found that a great part of what follows depends: for if the corruption be ascribed to one branch of the line of Ham, the testimonies of the other branches must either be referred to that branch by a series of etymologies, or be set aside; whereas if it be ascribed to the line of Ham in its two principal branches, the testimonies of Egypt and of the East may each be received in its own place, and the etymologies, which have been made to bear the weight of the whole, may be relieved of a burden which, as I shall show, they are not able to sustain.³ NB-07-003 NB-05-011 NB-04-002

○The third thesis is, that the corruption proceeded by four modes, and by these only: the transfer of the divine titles to the sun; the deifying of the patriarchs; the remembrance of the Deluge in the gods of the waters; and the concealment of the deposit in the Mysteries. I do not affirm that every fable which is to be found among the heathen can be referred to one of these modes and to no other; on the contrary, it will appear that the greater part of them have been produced by the concurrence of two or more, and that it is precisely the failure to distinguish the modes, where they concur, which has led the most learned of those who have preceded me to confound, under one explanation, things which require several. But I affirm that the modes are four, and that the distinction of them is the condition of any explanation which does not explain too much; and I shall endeavour to show, in its place, that the order of their operation can in some instances be determined from the testimony of the heathen themselves.⁴ NB-36-009

×The fourth thesis is, that the Stoics and the Alexandrians rightly perceived that the fables signify, but mistook the thing signified, reading as physics or as morals what was in truth history. To this thesis I attach a greater importance than its place in the enumeration might suggest; for it is from the Stoics, and from those who in later times adopted their method, that the moderns have chiefly derived both their contempt for the literal fable and their confidence in the physical interpretation of it, and it will not be possible to establish the historical interpretation which I propose without first showing, from the testimony of the Stoics themselves, that their own interpretation was of later origin than the fables to which they applied it, and was received by them from the masters of a particular school.⁵ NB-17-005 NB-15-011

×The fifth thesis is, that the fable of the poets, composed for pleasure or for a purpose, is to be distinguished from the tradition of a people, and set aside. It is not my intention to deny that the poets have preserved, together with much that they invented, some part of what they received; but I hold that the testimony of a poet is to be admitted only so far as it can be shown to be the testimony of a people, and that a relation which bears upon its face the marks of a particular composition, and of a particular purpose, is to be excluded from the inquiry, however ancient its author, and however considerable his name. The rule is a severe one, and I am aware that it will deprive the argument of many illustrations which might have been thought to strengthen it; but it is better that the argument should be supported by fewer witnesses whose testimony is genuine, than by many of whom the greater part are only repeating, under a borrowed character, the inventions of a single mind.⁶ NB-15-003 NB-12-009

×The sixth thesis is, that language preserves the original names beneath their corruptions, and that the proof by names, rightly conducted, is a proof. I am not ignorant of the discredit into which this kind of proof has fallen, nor of the causes, which are to be found less in the nature of the proof than in the manner in which it has been conducted by some of its most considerable advocates, who, having once persuaded themselves that a name was to be found in every word which resembled it, have produced a multitude of derivations of which the greater part are such as no sound could refuse and no sound could confirm. But the abuse of a method is no argument against its use; and I shall endeavour to show, under the proper head, that a name which is preserved in the mouths of a people, and which needs no etymology to be found, is a testimony of a very different order from a name which is recovered by the comparison of syllables, and that the proof by names, when it is confined to the former, and admits the latter only as confirmation, is entitled to the rank of a proof.⁷ NB-06-009 NB-06-031

○The four remaining theses correspond to the four modes, and form the subjects of the four Books which follow the first: the seventh, that the transfer of the divine titles to the sun was a mode of corruption, and a late one, and not, as Mr. Bryant and those who follow him maintain, the original worship from which the deifying of ancestors was afterwards derived;⁸ the eighth, that certain of the gods of the heathen were patriarchs, deified after their deaths, and that their names, their genealogies and their inventions, when they are referred to their proper persons, preserve the history of the families from which the nations descended; the ninth, that the Deluge was remembered among the nations in the gods of the waters, and that in these the vessel and its freight, and not, as has been supposed, the patriarch alone, are to be recognised; and the tenth, that the deposit was in the end concealed in the Mysteries, and that the Mysteries are therefore to be regarded, not as the contrivance of a policy, but as the keeping of a trust, of which the priesthood that kept it had in great part forgotten the meaning.⁹ NB-22-009 NB-12-017 NB-36-004 NB-44-039

○It remains only to state the principle upon which the testimonies have been selected and arranged. It has been my endeavour to give to each of the theses an adequate, and not a disproportionate, illustration; neither omitting any testimony which bears materially upon it, nor multiplying testimonies which only repeat one another; and where I have been obliged to choose between a testimony which is clear and one which is ancient, I have preferred, for the purposes of exposition, the clear, and have reserved the ancient for the confirmation. The reader who desires to examine any testimony at length will find it in its place among the collections from which the work has been formed, and to which the notes refer; and if he finds that the illustration of some heads is fuller than that of others, he will, I trust, attribute the inequality, not to any inattention to the principle which I have stated, but to the inequality of the materials which antiquity has left us.¹⁰ NB-36-009 NB-22-009 NB-44-039