Clavis Mythologiarum

CONCLUSION.

○It has been the object of the foregoing pages to apply, to the several classes of testimony which antiquity has left us, the theses which were enumerated in the Introduction, and to show, so far as the materials at present collected permit, that the fables of the heathen, when they are distinguished from the readings which the poets and the philosophers have imposed upon them, preserve, under corruptions which can be classed and whose order can in some instances be determined, the memory of a deposit which was delivered to the first men. I do not pretend that the application has been carried, in every head, to the degree of completeness which the subject requires; and I am sensible that there are heads in which the testimonies have been rather collected than weighed, and others in which the weighing has been deferred to a place which the limits of the present volume did not permit me to reach. But I trust that enough has been done to show that the method is capable of being applied, and that the result of its application, so far as it has proceeded, is not unfavourable to the theses which it was designed to establish.1 NB-10-006 NB-04-002 NB-36-009

○If the theses be allowed, it will follow that the key which has been sought by so many inquirers, and which each of them has supposed himself to have found in some single principle, whether the worship of the sun, or the deifying of ancestors, or the remembrance of the Deluge, or the policy of legislators, is to be found in none of these by itself, but in the distinction of them and the determination of their order; that each of the principles which the moderns have severally proposed is a true account of one mode of corruption, and a false account of the whole; and that the error of those who have preceded me has lain, as I have had frequent occasion to observe, less in what they have affirmed than in what they have omitted to consider. The instance of Dagon, in which the fish and the grain have been severally chosen by different writers, and severally referred by others to the patriarch and to the sameness of a god, may serve to show in what manner the key is to be applied; and the application of it to that instance, which I have indicated in its place, will be completed when the testimonies which unite the two have been laid before the reader in the order which the argument requires.2 NB-36-004 NB-39-011 NB-22-009 NB-12-017 NB-44-039

○It will not, I trust, be thought foreign to the design of the work, nor inconsistent with the reserve which I have endeavoured to maintain throughout it, if I add in this place that the deposit of which the heathen fables are the corruption is the same with that which the sacred Scriptures preserve entire, and of which the promise of a Deliverer formed, as I have shown in the first thesis, a principal part. The nations among whom that deposit was dispersed retained, some more and some less, the memory of what they had received; and the corruptions which it suffered among them were not, as some have supposed, the inventions of an imagination acting without materials, but the obscuring of a truth which they had once possessed. Whence it follows that the Gospel, when it was preached among the nations, did not come to them as altogether new, but as the restoration of what had been delivered to their fathers and had been in great part forgotten; and that the testimonies of the heathen, so far from being opposed to the revelation, are, when they are rightly classed, among the witnesses to its antiquity.3 NB-47-015 NB-11-005 NB-10-006

×There remain certain questions which have been raised in the course of the work and which it has not been possible to determine: among them, the number and the identity of the Cabeiri, which I have shown to be undetermined by the testimonies at present collected; and the question, which of the patriarchs was worshipped by the Cretans under the name of Jupiter, which I reserved, in the excursus upon that island, to this place.4 These questions, together with the completion of those heads in which the weighing of the testimonies has been deferred, will be taken up in the volumes which are to follow, when the materials, which are in a state of considerable forwardness, shall have been reduced to the order which the present volume has endeavoured to establish; and I shall then be able to lay before the reader, in its proper form, the proof of those parts of the argument which it has here been possible only to indicate. NB-33-002 NB-30-013 NB-27-006 NB-28-008

Footnotes

  1. The theses are enumerated in the Introduction; the classes of testimony are distributed among the five Books and the two excursuses on Crete. ↩

  2. See the second head of the fourth Book. The writers to whom I refer are Selden, who chose the fish (Selden, de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 3), Philo Byblius, who gives the corn (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10), Mr. Faber, who refers both to the patriarch (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.), and Mr. Bryant, who refers both to the sameness of a god (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). ↩

  3. For the confession of the Greeks that they received the names of their gods from a people older than themselves, see the historian (Herod. ii. 50); and for the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which the same historian says the Egyptians were the first to hold (Herod. ii. 123), see the first head of the first Book. ↩

  4. For the Cabeiri, see the fourth, fifth and sixth heads of the third Book; for the Cretan Jupiter, the second excursus. The testimony of the theologians whom Cotta cites, that the tomb of the Cretan Jupiter was shown in the island (Cic. de Nat. Deor. iii. § 53), and that of the poet, who denies his death (Callim. Hymn. in Jov. 8, 9), are set side by side in the former excursus. ↩

← EXCURSUS B. ON CRETE, THE SECOND.APPENDIX. ANIMADVERSIONS ON A RECENT RECENSION. →