The Notebooks

Four sons of Ham, in the order in which the sacred writer gives them: Cush, Mizraim, Phut and Canaan. Of these the sacred text pursues the line of Cush before any other, and names five sons of Cush and two sons of Raamah, and one more, Nimrod, whom it sets apart; and it says of him that he began to be a mighty one, but not where, nor over whom. I draw out the pedigree in the first leaves of this book, to be corrected as the later notes require, and I add nothing to it from any other author.

Seven are named, and the Philistines are said to have come out of the sixth, Casluhim, and not of the fourth son of Ham. This is the whole of what the text gives of the house of Mizraim; the places they inhabited are not told. Entered as it stands. If any of these names should be found among the heathen as the name of a god, it is to stand with the deified patriarchs.

The sacred text affirms a single language before the building of the city, and says nothing of its name, of its words, or of the manner in which it was acquired by those who spoke it. Qu. whether it was given with the first man, or learned. The place does not decide, and I enter the question without an answer.

The confusion is ascribed to the act of the LORD, and its effect is stated as a want of understanding between speakers: that they may not understand one another's speech. Whether the words were changed, or the power of receiving them, or both, the sacred text does not say; nor whether all the languages of the earth are the issue of this one event. These three to be kept apart until the authors are read. What precedes is entered on an earlier leaf.

Their own reason is given in their own words, and it is a precaution: lest we be scattered. The scattering was therefore foreseen by them before it was done to them, and the city was built against it. The text ascribes to them no other design, and I ascribe none.

Bochart, in the summary of his fourth book, places Chus in Arabia, as one long an exile from his country (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. iv. cap. 2). The preface only is read; the chapter is not yet before me, and I do not say on what grounds. The text names the sons and the sons of Raamah, and names no country for any of them. Whether the seat of the father is to be learned from the names of the sons is the question; Bochart may have answered it, and the chapter is to be read for the answer.

The work was left unfinished; the name of the place is given from the event, and the sacred writer himself says why it was so called. I add no derivation of my own. That the name is not the name of the builders but one given afterward is evident from the word therefore.

The idol had a head and hands, which were severed, and a remainder, which was left; more than this the sacred text does not say. Selden (de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 3), following the Rabbins, understands that which was left to have been the form of a fish, and derives the name from dag, a fish; and in this the commentators have generally acquiesced. I enter the place under the idols of the Philistines, without at present affirming anything as to the figure. To be compared with what the Greeks relate of the Syrian goddess, and with the Chaldean account in Berosus.

Bochart makes Canaan the same as Mercury (Phaleg, lib. i. cap. 2): both were sons of Jove, which with him is Ham; both are named from trade; and as Canaan was a servant to his brothers, so the heathen bound Mercury to servile ministries. He adds that Mercury is set over roads because the Canaanites, that is the Phenicians, were the first to venture on the remotest voyages, and that the Phenicians called Mercury by a word meaning minister. Entered as he gives it. Of the three grounds the second and third are the nearer to a testimony; the first rests on taking Jove for Ham, which is his reading and not yet shewn. Whether it is Canaan, and not another son of Ham, who is meant wherever the heathen name Mercury, I cannot say from this chapter. To be looked at again when the other sons are read.

Mr. Bryant calls the descendants of Chus Cuthites and Cuseans, and the first apostates from the truth, though great in worldly wisdom (Bryant, Analysis, vol. i. Preface). Josephus has the name and no more: it was still in his day the name of a nation. Apostasy implies a truth previously held. Mr. Bryant takes that for granted in the preface, and I do not find that he proves it there. The point is to be taken up under the first revelation, and not decided from the name.

Bochart treats the colonies sent out by the Phenicians in almost every region of the world, and assigns as the chief cause want of room, the whole land having been taken up by the Hebrews (Bochart, Chanaan, lib. i. cap. 2). This is a second dispersal, and later than the first. The two are to be kept distinct in the entries that follow: the one is the act of the LORD upon the whole earth, the other a departure by sea of a single people, for a reason that is in the text of Bochart and not in the sacred text.

A second place for Dagon, with the first in Notebook 3. Here he is the god of the lords of the Philistines, and nothing is said of his figure. Entered only.

Four sons of Ham are named, and the text in this place says nothing of any honour paid to Ham by those who came after him. Mr. Bryant holds that the Cuthites and their kindred (Mizraim, the Caphtorim and the sons of Canaan) were all of the line of Ham; that they called him Amon; that having in process of time raised him to a divinity they worshipped him as the Sun; and that from this worship they were styled Amonians (Analysis, vol. i. Preface). The first of these statements is the text's own. The rest are his, and each depends on the one before it: the name is inferred from the worship, and the worship is asserted, not shewn. A collective name for the line of Ham is lawful, if it be understood as a name of convenience; it becomes an argument only when the ancient witness is produced who says that Ham was called Amon and worshipped. That witness I have not yet found. To be kept under the deified patriarchs, and nothing built upon the name until the place is found.

The first seat of the line of Cush that the text names is the land of Shinar, and the first of his cities Babel. Asshur goes out of that land and builds Nineveh. Josephus has Nimrod remain and rule at Babylon (Joseph. Antiq. lib. i. c. 6), which I take for the Babel of the text. Whether the line of Cush is confined to this land the verses do not say, and Josephus, in this sentence, does not say. The seat of Nimrod is to be entered as Shinar, and nothing more is to be inferred from it until the other places of the name are collected.

Here a name is preserved: the Ethiopians answer to it in their own mouths and in the mouths of others, and no etymology is required to find it. The method of Mr. Bryant is of another kind. He proposes to divest mythology of every foreign and unmeaning ornament, and to shew that the rites and mysteries of the Gentiles were memorials of their principal ancestors and of the great occurrences they had witnessed (Analysis, vol. i. Preface). The Greeks, he says, strangely perverted ancient terms, and the only way of insight is an etymological process, by recurring to the primitive language of the people (Analysis, vol. i. Preface). Of the purpose I make no complaint. The fault is in the logic of the means. If every word of the Greeks that resembles a patriarch's name be taken for that name perverted, then Chus, rendered by the Greeks as a word like their word for gold, with Chruse and Chrusopolis named from him (Analysis, vol. i. Radicals, Chus), is proved by nothing but the resemblance; and a derivation which no sound can refuse is confirmed by no sound. Names so recovered are to be entered as conjectures; names preserved, as here, as testimony.

The Canaanites are bounded at Gaza on the south-west, and the country of Mizraim's children begins at Gaza, if Josephus is to be understood as he is written (Joseph. Antiq. lib. i. c. 6). Two sons of Ham, then, held land that met at one place; and the Scripture and the historian, who do not agree about the number of Mizraim's sons, agree about this. The place is a fixed point, and I enter it for that reason only.

Copied from the Preface (Bryant, Analysis, vol. i. Preface), where he states what the work is to do. He names as the chief of these occurrences the Deluge and the renewal of the world in one family. The word on which the whole depends is "all". That some rites were memorials of ancestors I do not doubt; that every rite and mystery of the Gentiles was one is a proposition to be tried name by name, and not taken from a preface. Qu. whether the great occurrences are the same in every nation, or are made the same by the manner in which the names are brought to agree.

Josephus affirms that time has not hurt the name of Chus, the Ethiopians being called Chusites to his own day, and that Egypt was called Mestre, from Mizraim. Bochart places Chus in Arabia (Phaleg, lib. iv. cap. 2), and is at issue with Josephus as to the seat, though not as to the name. Mr. Bryant makes the sons of Chus the most considerable and the most enterprising branch of the whole family, and traces them into countries widely distant by their family title (Analysis, vol. i. Of Chus), supposing the Greeks to have turned the name into their word for gold. That the name was carried abroad I admit; that it is to be recognised in every name which resembles it I do not. It is to be considered whether Mr. Bryant has not given to one son what belongs to the whole line of Ham, and whether Mizraim has not at the least an equal share. The limits of the Cushite name to be fixed before anything is built upon it.

Mizraim is here one who begat; and his sons are named with the same ending as himself. Bochart holds that Mizraim is not the name of a man, the dual form not allowing it, and that the second son of Ham stands for the father of the inhabitants of Egypt (Phaleg, lib. iv. cap. 24). Mr. Bryant reports that many learned men take the term to be a plural, a people being signified rather than a person, and that the head of the family is imagined to have been Misor, or Metzor (Analysis, vol. i. Radicals, Mizraim). The two stand nearer than they appear. Bochart denies the man and yet allows a father of the people; and a father of a people is a person, whatever the form of his name. The argument from form, if it is good for the father, is good for the sons; and Genesis says that the father begat them. The form proves a people. Whether the people had one who gave it his name the form does not decide.

The same country is made by Josephus to bear the name of two of Ham's descendants: of Phut at the first, and afterwards, by a change, of a son of Mesraim (Joseph. Antiq. lib. i. c. 6). The older name remained, he says, in the Grecian historiographers and in the river. Here, then, is a case in which the name of one son of Ham was displaced by the name of another's son, and the witness for it is ancient. Whether the displacement was of the kind he reports, or whether he has made the two names answer to two persons because he found two names, I cannot decide. It is enough that Mizraim's line is shewn to have given a name to a country as well as Chus's. The testimony to be set beside the Ethiopians (see Notebook 6).

With the four entered in Notebook 7 these make seven peoples begotten of Mizraim. Mr. Bryant says that the Mizraim who settled in Egypt were branched out into seven families, of which the Caphtorim were one, who seem to have resided between Pelusium and Mount Casius upon the sea-coast (Analysis, vol. iii. Of Egypt, and its first Inhabitants). The number is Scripture's and he has it from thence; the seat is his own, and "seem" is his word. Bochart heads a chapter with the seven sons of Mizraim, and says that Josephus, who preferred to cut the knot rather than untie it, confesses that of those peoples, one excepted, he knows nothing at all, save that their cities were overturned and destroyed in the Ethiopian war (Phaleg, lib. iv. cap. 25). Josephus, then, whom I rely upon for Chus and for the name of Egypt, is no witness to these; and the families rest on Genesis alone, and the places on conjecture. Their seats to be left unfixed until some witness be found.

What the priests tell is of a man and of his works: a dam, a river turned from its channel, a city founded (Herod. ii. 99). They do not say that he was the son of any one, or that Min was Mizraim. Now Bochart says that Mizraim is not the name of a man, the dual form not suffering it (Phaleg, lib. iv. cap. 24); and Mr. Bryant reports that many writers suppose the first king to have been Mizraim (Analysis, vol. iii. Of the Egyptian Kings, and Dynasties). These two cannot both stand. If Bochart is right the many suppose a man where there is a country; if they are right, the argument from the form fails. Herodotus decides neither, and I enter his king as he gives him.

Menes stands first in most lists of the Egyptian kings, and Mr. Bryant reports that many suppose him to have been Mizraim, others Ham, others Noah (Analysis, vol. iii. Of the Egyptian Kings, and Dynasties). The opinions cannot all be held of one man, Ham being the father of Mizraim (Gen. x. 6–8); and the report is of the disagreement of the writers, not of any witness. Mr. Bryant afterwards doubts that Mizraim reigned in Egypt, and holds Menes to have been another person. The verses entered say of one in the line of Cush that he began to be a mighty one in the earth; of any king in the line of Mizraim they say nothing. I enter the three opinions and the objection to the first, and no more. Qu. whether the lists, when they are collected, will admit any of the three.

Two witnesses, each reporting what the priests said, and each naming the first king: Herodotus Min (Herod. ii. 4), Diodorus Menas (Diod. Sic. i. 45). Both have gods before him. The names differ, though not by much; Menas I take for the Menes of the lists. Neither calls him Mizraim, nor Ham, nor Noah. These Mr. Bryant reports as the guesses of writers (Analysis, vol. iii. Of the Egyptian Kings, and Dynasties), and they are brought to the name from without: the identification is a premise taken to the witnesses, not a finding made from them. What the priests said, and what is afterwards made of it, are to be kept in two columns.

The priests, according to Diodorus, ascribe to the first king the teaching of worship and sacrifice (Diod. Sic. i. 45). It is said that he taught, and nothing is said of whence he had it. The Egyptians' account of the beginning of their rites is therefore of a thing delivered to the people, and not discovered by them. More than this the passage does not say, and I enter it as such, and make no use of what follows it in Diodorus.

Mr. Bryant sets Cadmus with Hermes, Thoth and Osiris, and says that under these characters more than one person is alluded to (Analysis, vol. ii. Cadmus); he then makes him principally Ham, whom his posterity looked up to as the Sun. Two things are joined here which do not agree. If several persons are meant, to find the four names the same is to identify none of them; and if Ham is principally meant, it is to be asked in which of the names he is principal. I do not yet know what the ancient witnesses say of Hermes and Thoth separately. They are to be collected apart, before the names are suffered to stand together.

Herodotus affirms that the names of nearly all the gods came into Greece from Egypt, excepts a small number, among them the Dioscuri, and gives the whole as what the Egyptians themselves say. The relation is therefore Egyptian, and reaches us through a Greek. It shews that the names travelled by this road; it does not shew that Egypt was where they began, and a name found there is not for that reason of Egyptian making. Whether the Egyptians spoke of the names only, or of the persons also, is to be seen before anything is built upon the place.

Diodorus, reporting the Egyptians, gives to Hermes the further articulation of the common language of mankind, the naming of things which had no name, and the invention of the alphabet. The word to be observed is further. A common language is supposed to have been in use before him, and he is said to have carried it on; the relation does not say that he made it. The invention of letters is another claim, and is not to be confounded with this one. Diodorus says Hermes and not Thoth; the name of Thoth I supply, upon the ground that the Egyptian inventor of letters is elsewhere so called, and I do not take it from him. The question of the first speech is not decided here. I enter the place under the primeval tradition, because the Egyptian relation itself presupposes it.

The office is a priestly one, and he who holds it serves a king: it is the description of a man in a station, and not of a power. This sentence does not shew whether the scribe of Osiris was the first of those who bore the name, or one of a succession in the office. To stand with the deified patriarchs, if the identification with Thoth be made good.

Herodotus is convinced by inquiry that the names came to the Greeks from foreign parts, and chiefly from Egypt. Huet holds that almost the whole theology of the heathen flowed from Moses, and that the Hebrew doctrine passed through the Phenicians and Egyptians to the Greeks and the maritime nations of the West (Huet, Demonstr. Evang. prop. iv. cap. 3). For the last stage of the road the two are agreed. The first stage Herodotus does not touch; and whether the Egyptians had the doctrine from the writings of Moses, or earlier, with Mizraim, from the family of Ham, the place cannot determine. Huet adds that the truth was afterwards wrapped in so many fables that it can hardly be unfolded; in this I follow him.

Philo Byblius makes Kronos give all Egypt to Tauthus, whom I take to be Thoth, and says that what was recorded was recorded first by the seven sons of Suduc, the Cabeiri, and an eighth brother, Asclepius, at his command. Tauthus is here a person to whom a country is assigned and who gives orders to others; the record is by him authorised, not made by him. The Cabeiri appear in Egypt in this place, as the sons of Suduc. Their number, seven with an eighth, is to be ascertained before anything is built upon it, and whether they are the same as the Cabeiri of other accounts I leave open.

Huet makes Vulcan to be Moses by way of Osiris (Demonstr. Evang. prop. iv. cap. 4). He says that Iamblichus and Proclus both identify Amun, Phtha, Vulcan and Osiris, and that he has already obtained that Osiris is Moses; and that Cicero and Diogenes Laertius call Vulcan the son of the Nile, which he explains by the infant Moses being found among the waters of the Nile. The identification of the four Egyptian names I enter with the two authors on whom he rests it. The step that Osiris is Moses he here takes as settled, and I have not weighed it; until I have, I enter nothing from this chapter as shewn. The sonship of the Nile is a separate point, and a separate witness.

Plutarch reports, without choosing, that many have made Isis the daughter of Hermes and many the daughter of Prometheus, giving to the first the authorship of letters and music, to the second of wit and forecast. It is a report of what is said, and he does not say which he holds. Mr. Bryant numbers both Hermes and Prometheus among the titles under which the history of the Patriarch is recorded (Analysis, vol. ii. Of some Titles and Personages); if he be right, the two companies of Plutarch's many are divided over one person under two names. That follows from his position; it is not in Plutarch, who gives two fathers with a gift to each. Which is the case the testimony does not determine. The genealogy is entered under fable, as one which Plutarch himself reports only as said.

The Theuth of Plato is the Thoth of the Egyptians: the inventor of numbers, of astronomy and of letters. That part of the relation which respects the god and his inventions I take to be Egyptian tradition; the conversation with the king Thamus, which follows, is the philosopher's own, composed for the purpose of the dialogue, and is to be set aside as literary fable. Cicero has the name as Theyt (de Nat. Deor. iii. § 56); Philo Byblius as Taautus, whom he makes the son of Misor and the inventor of the first letters (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10). Mr. Bryant resolves Theuth, Thoth, Taut and Taautes into one title of the chief god of Egypt (Analysis, vol. i. Radicals), and allows that Misor is Mizraim. But if Misor be Mizraim, then Taautus, his son, is a man, and the grandson of Ham; not a title, nor the chief god, but a patriarch deified. Mr. Bryant has the premises and declines the conclusion. To stand with the deified patriarchs.

Philo gives Taautus a father, and gives him the names of Thoyth, Thoth and Hermes among the three peoples; so that the Greek name is here joined to the Egyptian and the Alexandrian. Huet's chapter on the borrowing of the heathen theology reckons the Taautus of the Phenicians among those who are Moses (Huet, Demonstr. Evang. prop. iv. cap. 3). The conjecture, to stand, requires one of two things: that the genealogy be set aside, or that Misor be a name of an ancestor of Moses. The testimony offers neither. I take Misor to be Mizraim, which would place Taautus in the family of Ham and not in the family of Moses; see Notebook 12.

Huet, in his chapter on Moses reckoned a god by the Egyptians (Demonstr. Evang. prop. iv. cap. 4), judges that Mercury is Moses himself, on the most probable conjectures; that Vulcan is Moses, because Amun, Phtha, Vulcan and Osiris are one, and Osiris has been established to be Moses; and that Serapis is Moses, the name being derived from a Hebrew verb which signifies to burn. In Diodorus the one is the sovereign and the other his counsellor, and the sovereign takes his counsel above that of all others. If both be Moses, the relation as Diodorus gives it falls to the ground; and it is not apparent that a conclusion drawn from a derivation, or from a premise that I have not seen proved, is to be preferred to a relation which names two persons. I enter the three identifications and do not adopt them.

The Egyptians accounted their houses as inns, and bestowed little care upon them; their tombs they called everlasting habitations. From this it may be collected that the accommodation of the living was extremely narrow, and that what is admired of their building was not designed for the living at all. The place does not belong to any head of the present inquiry; but I enter it, as bearing upon the manners of the people among whom the tradition was longest kept, and as a caution against inferring from the magnitude of their monuments the convenience of their lives.

My ancestor argues (Is. Casaub. Exercit. i. § 10) that if the book were truly Hermes's, either Hermes wrote it in Greek or some one translated it from the Egyptian, and that he denies both. His first reason is the style, which is quite different from the language of the Greeks who were Hermes's contemporaries. He sets passages of the Poemander beside the Gospel of John, and asks whether a heathen Egyptian older than Moses could have known the Word, the Son of God. The argument is against the book as we have it. It is to be kept apart from the question whether there was an Egyptian Hermes, or a Thoth, to whom writings were ascribed; and I enter it here so that the two be not confused in what follows.

Osiris places Hermes at the side of Isis, and the reason given is that his prudence raised him above the king's other friends. One who is placed by another, and ranked among a king's friends, has a king above him. Mr. Bryant gives Hermes and Thoth to the Patriarch in the opening of one chapter (Analysis, vol. ii. Of some Titles and Personages), and in another says of Cadmus, whom he makes the same as Hermes, Thoth and Osiris, that he may principally be esteemed Ham (Analysis, vol. ii. Cadmus). The same titles go in the one place to the father, in the other to the son, and the place of Diodorus allows neither. Mr. Bryant adds that more than one person is alluded to under these characters; the admission is to be taken, and the persons are then to be named; the words cited do not distinguish them. Qu. whether the counsellor be not of a later generation than either.

Plutarch gives it as what the Egyptians themselves intend by their tales, that the wanderings and dismemberments of the gods were never so done as they are told. The testimony is of consequence: a heathen writer, with the relations before him, does not suppose them to have been history, and does not ask that they be believed. What he substitutes I have not here set down; the examples that follow in the same place belong to another entry. It is enough for the present that the letter of the fable was disowned by those who kept it. The question remains what the fable was disowned in favour of, and whether the thing it replaced was not older than the meaning laid upon it. To stand with the Stoics and Alexandrians.

The Stoic speaker derives the multitude of the gods from a physical reasoning, and charges the poets with having received them in human form, and the common life with the superstition that followed. The school is named by its masters: the topic was handled by Zeno, and enlarged by Cleanthes and Chrysippus. It follows that the method has an origin in a school and in a date, and that what it explains is already before it, the fables being the poets' and the gods in human form being the thing to be accounted for. I take the admission as it stands (ii. § 63, 64): that the shapes were given by the poets is conceded; that the reasoning of the schools is the true account of them is not shewn.

Cornutus, in the chapter on Rhea, makes her the Atargatis of the Syrians, and gives as the honour paid to her an abstaining from the dove and from fish. The identification is the Greek's; the abstinence is the Syrians' own. The clause that follows in the text, which would say what the abstinence is taken to signify, is not entered, the text being doubtful in that place. I copy only what is plain. The fish is not to be dismissed as a detail of the rite; it is to be considered under the Waters, and the Greek reading of it set beside the Syrian.

The interpreters whom Plutarch has just named, and whom he does not name again, apply to the Egyptian gods the method which the Greeks are used to apply to their own: Saturn into time, Juno into air, Vulcan into the change of air to fire; and so Osiris is made the Nile, Isis the earth, and Typhon the sea. The testimony is Plutarch's report of a practice, not his own doctrine. I note that the same key is turned in both countries, and that it yields in both a natural history in the place of a human one. Whether Osiris was a river is a question the method does not put to itself, nor whether he was anything else. To stand with the Stoics.

Balbus, for the Stoics, allows that the fables are impious, and maintains that a meaning is shut up in them; and so far he is right, and is to be cited as a witness that the wiser heathen never supposed the fables to mean what they say. His error lies in the thing signified. He finds in Saturn the course of time, and in the mutilation of Heaven a doctrine concerning the ethereal fire; that is, he looks for physics where he should have looked for history. That an old opinion had filled Greece he himself affirms: whence it came he does not inquire. The derivation of Saturnus from being sated with years is of the kind which Cotta afterwards exposes (iii. § 62), and I make no use of it. To stand with Cornutus under the Stoics, and with what is to be collected from the Alexandrians.

Five names, five derivations, each drawn from the sound of the word and each yielding a meaning that the word will carry. Cotta sets them down as the Stoic manner, and I copy them as the Academic's best exposure of it (iii. § 62). The fault is in the rule, not in any one instance: a name that can be resolved by its sound into a verb can be resolved into several, as Minerva is made to diminish or to threaten with the same ease; and a rule that gives two answers for one name has not been shewn to give the right one for any. Whatever the Stoics found in the fables, they did not find it by this road. To be kept apart from the Stoic physical account, which stands on the ground of the thing signified.

The relation is here given as it was told, the stone in the swaddling clothes and the infant hidden; and Cornutus, who has just said that what comes to be in time is consumed by time, takes the swallowing "in another way" from that which he has given, as touching the beginning of the world. Compare Cicero's Stoic, who has for Saturn the course and revolution of spaces and seasons (de Nat. Deor. ii. § 63, 64), and to whom the mutilation, not the swallowing, is the matter (Notebook 17). Two interpreters of one school, then, lay two meanings on one fable, and neither asks which of the two the first tellers intended. That the fable had a meaning is not disputed by me; that it was either of these is not shewn. To stand with the Stoics, with the readings set in two columns.

Herodotus says that the Egyptians alone keep their cattle under the same roof with themselves, and that they make their dough with the feet and take up mud and dung with the hands. The house, then, was shared with the beasts, and the room it afforded to the family was narrow in proportion. The matter does not belong to any head of the inquiry; I enter it nevertheless, as part of the manner of life of the people among whom the relations were kept.

Origen reports this of Chrysippus with disapproval, and I copy it only for the sake of the interpretation, which is a doctrine of matter and of the god (Orig. cont. Cels. lib. iv. c. 48). The picture is older than the interpretation, and is taken as it stood, together with the conduct that Origen says it represented; the meaning is carried to it from the school. Here the Stoic method is seen at its furthest from any history: no person is left in the scene, Juno being matter and Jupiter god. What the painter or the people of Samos intended is not asked. To stand with the physical readings, and to be kept distinct from the account of Saturn in Notebook 17.

The Alexandrian does here to the sacred text what the Stoic did to the fables of the poets: the trees are denied, and a meaning found in the place of them (Phil. Jud. de Mundi Opificio). The two cases are not equal. The poets' relations are the tradition of the heathen, corrupted in the carrying; the history in Genesis is the original from which the corruption is to be measured. To take from it the letter, as Philo does, is to give up the fixed point; and then the Alexandrian has no standard by which to correct the heathen. I do not say what he intended by it, only what the method, so applied, leaves standing. To stand with the Alexandrians.

Philo divides the account of the serpent and the woman from the fables of the poets, and calls it a type. In this I follow him as far as the division: the narrative of Moses is not of the family of the poets' tales. What he draws out of it I set down without adopting. The serpent is made a symbol of pleasure for want of feet; the reason is of the kind that would serve for any creature that has none. The reader is to consider that the sacred narrative has been left as a moral, and that the moral is of Philo's finding.

The principle named is natural philosophy (Phil. Jud. Alleg. Leg. lib. ii.). The Alexandrian allegory is therefore of the Stoic kind, physics for history, and differs only in its matter, which is the sacred text. The passage says that it is spoken allegorically, and names the principles by which it is to be taken. The sentence is broken off at the soul, and I copy no more of it.

Origen's complaint against Celsus is one of consistency: the Egyptians' fables are credited with a philosophical meaning, and the histories of Moses are not (Orig. cont. Cels. lib. i. c. 20). The argument is good so far as it goes. It does not settle which of the two is the history and which the fable. Origen assumes that the relations of Egypt have a philosophical meaning; I enter that as his assumption, and not as the Egyptians' testimony. The remainder of his sentence, in which he asserts an allegorical meaning for Moses, I do not copy; it is to be considered with the Alexandrians.

Origen says that Numenius the Pythagorean quotes Moses and the prophets in many of his works and gives them an allegorical meaning that is, in Origen's word, not improbable (Orig. cont. Cels. lib. iv. c. 51). What a heathen possessed of Moses he may have possessed by reading him, and a quotation from the writings is no proof of a tradition older than the writings. I enter it under the primeval revelation as a witness that is not yet one: the point to be shewn is that the heathen had the substance before the books, and the testimony supplies only the books. The works named by Origen, I have not seen.

The fragment, which begins in the middle of Cotta's list, is said of the fifth Mercury, and gives the name of one who gave the Egyptians laws and letters. The month that bears it is the first of their year (iii. § 56). A name so used in the calendar is Egyptian in its own country, and is not a Greek rendering. Whether the giver of laws and letters was a man or a title the passage does not say. Mem. to compare the forms of the name in the several writers.

Macrobius relates two things, and they are to be entered apart: that the Egyptians bring forth such a child from the shrine on a certain day, and that this child is the sun at the shortest day of the year (Macrob. Saturn. i. 18). The first is a rite, and is testified. The second is the reason which he assigns to it, and rests upon his own reckoning. Vossius shews the worship of the sun to be very ancient, since Moses mentions it, and so did one who lived in the time of Moses or before him (Voss. de Theol. Gent. lib. ii.). This proves that the worship was early; it does not prove that it was first, and the antiquity of a corruption is no argument against the existence of that which it corrupted. What the child of the shrine was before it was referred to the sun, the passage does not say.

Praetextatus affirms that the poets, in their tales of the gods, take for the most part their seeds from the sanctuaries of philosophy (Macrob. Saturn. i. 17). 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, and is here assumed. 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. Qu. whether Praetextatus has not put the second thing for the first. To be considered under every deity whom he reduces to the sun.

Vossius argues that the worship of the sun is very ancient, since Moses mentions it, and so does the one who lived in the time of Moses or earlier, namely Job (Voss. de Theol. Gent. lib. ii.). The rite he draws from the place in Job is the kissing of the hand toward the sun. In his first book he holds that the gods were first men, citing Euhemerus of Messene (Voss. de Theol. Gent. lib. i.). Both are entered. That the sun was worshipped early I do not question; the antiquity of a worship is not the priority of the error, and it does not shew that the sun was worshipped as a god before men were. Qu. whether Vossius sees that his two books are to be reconciled, and how.

Plutarch does not say that the Egyptians held Osiris to be the sun. He says that there are some who scruple not to say so, and the opinion is reported as theirs (Plut. de Is. et Osir.). Mr. Bryant is to be asked what order he intends. In the Preface he has the posterity of Ham raise him to a divinity, and then worship him as the Sun (Analysis, vol. i. Preface); in the first of the Radicals he has them worship the sun originally, and afterwards confer his titles upon their ancestors (Analysis, vol. i. Radicals). In the one the man is deified and then called the sun; in the other the sun is worshipped and then the man is given his titles. I do not find how both can stand together, and I cannot take the one without refusing the other. The opinion of the some in Plutarch is evidence that it was held, and of no more.

The Egyptians above the marsh sleep in towers, where the winds keep off the gnats; those about the marshes sleep beneath the net which they use for fishing by day (Herod. ii. 95). It may be collected that in the lower country the accommodation was of the narrowest, a man's bed being no more than the space over which his net could be drawn. The place belongs to no head of the present inquiry, and I enter it only because it shews of what sort was the lodging of a people whose monuments are so much admired.

Mr. Faber supposes that the remembrance of the ancestors came first, and was turned into superstition, and that the veneration of the Sun, Moon and Stars was superadded, those bodies being thought the residence of the deified progenitors (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iv.). Mr. Bryant lays down the contrary order: the deity originally worshipped was the Sun, and its titles were afterwards conferred on the ancestors (Analysis, vol. i. Radicals). Two moderns who read the same fables give the sun opposite places, a first and a second, and both cannot be right. It is of consequence which, for on it depends whether the solar reading is a beginning or a later corruption. Not to be decided from either book; to be decided by the ancient witnesses, taken in their order.

The Assyrians, says Macrobius, give the name Adad to the god whom they revere as highest and greatest, and he reports that the name signifies "one, one" (Macrob. Saturn. i. 23). I enter the interpretation as his. I have not the means of trying it, and the testimonies at present collected do not determine whether the name was the Assyrians' own word for the highest God, or a title taken from another. That a highest God was acknowledged is the datum; that he is the sun is the addition of Macrobius, who introduces the passage as what the Assyrians think of the power of the sun. Vossius, treating of the worship of the sun, says that the nations, neglecting God, fixed all the zeal of their religion upon the sun, as the shadow rather than the image of the true godhead (Voss. de Theol. Gent. lib. ii.). If this be so, the sun is the substitute, and the title of the highest was before it. The goddess whom Macrobius joins with him, Adargatis, to be considered under the Waters.

Praetextatus undertakes to reduce nearly all the gods to the sun, and calls the reduction not superstition but divine reason. This is the fountain of the error which the moderns have repeated. Mr. Bryant lays it down at the outset that the deity originally worshipped was the sun, and that the titles of that luminary were afterwards conferred upon the ancestors of the family (Analysis, vol. i. Radicals); thus making that to be original which was itself a corruption, and inverting the order of the two. Mr. Faber unites the solar worship with that which he calls the Arkite (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iv.), and by this union is enabled to find either wherever he looks for the other. It will be shewn that the transfer of the divine titles to the sun is one mode of corruption, and one only; that it is later than the tradition which it obscured; and that so late a writer, who collects what the grammarians had said before him, is a witness to the prevalence of the opinion and to nothing more. The several deities to be taken in his order, from the seventeenth chapter to the twenty-third.

Of the goddess Macrobius says that she is introduced mourning; the reason that he gives, that the sun in his yearly course enters the lower half of the twelve signs, is the reckoning of the natural philosophers, and not the relation of a people (Macrob. Saturn. i. 21). Sir William Jones, in the one essay of his which I have, names as the second source of mythology a wild admiration of the heavenly bodies, and then the systems and calculations of astronomers, from which he derives a considerable portion of Egyptian and Grecian fable (Jones, Asiatick Researches, vol. i. 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India'). The first source he makes history, or natural truth perverted into fable. The Adonis of Macrobius belongs, I take it, to the second; and a system of astronomy is later than that to which it is applied. Of what the essay relates of countries beyond Greece and Italy I speak only as I find it there.

Sir William Jones, of whom I have the one essay (Jones, Asiatick Researches, vol. i. 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India'), says there seem to have been four principal sources of all mythology. The first is history or natural truth perverted into fable, with the deifying of great men; the second is the admiration of the heavenly bodies, and then the systems of astronomers; the third is the personifications of poets; the fourth the allegories of moralists and metaphysicians. He gives the sun a second place, after the deifying of men, and derives from it a considerable portion of the Egyptian and Grecian fable, and not the whole. Of the Persian types and emblems which he joins to it I know only what he tells, and can say nothing.

Two names are made one sun by a division of the day and the night, and the doctrine is declared to be kept in the sacred rites (Macrob. Saturn. i. 18). Mr. Faber, in his later work, allows that whatever belonged properly to the worship of deified mortals was transferred with great regularity to the worship of the sun and moon, and that Helius and Lunus were equally the great father (Origin of Pagan Idolatry, vol. i. bk. i. ch. i.). The transfer is thus placed in the direction which I take to be the right one. What he does not say is why the sun should have been the receiver. If the attributes were carried over, then Apollo by day and Liber by night are titles carried; and from what they were carried is the very thing which the reading of Macrobius leaves out. Qu. whether the division into the upper and lower hemispheres be not the reason of the philosophers, laid upon titles already in use.

The same writer, in the same sentence, says that the Egyptians have obscured the sense of the name and brought it into question (Plut. de Is. et Osir.). Mr. Faber has the histories of the principal deities allusive at once to the Sabian idolatry and to the deluge; Osiris and Isis, in one point of view, directing the attention to the Sun and the Moon, and in another to the great patriarch and the vessel in which he was preserved; and he adds that the Egyptians held both together (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iv.). Where the sense of a name is in question, a reading is wanted which will choose. A reading which accepts both, whichever the occasion offers, is refuted by no instance and established by none. I do not deny that the patriarch and the vessel are in the account; I deny that the Sun and the Moon are to be had with them for nothing. Each deity to be put to the testimonies separately, and not by a rule.

The pair is here the sun and the earth, and in the passage no man is named in either. Mr. Faber has the first postdiluvians convert the remembrance of their ancestors into a blind superstition, and afterwards superadd the veneration of the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, as the fit residence of their deified progenitors (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iv.). I follow him as to the order, which is that I take to be the true one, and differ as to the use. If the ancestors were first, the passage of Macrobius has the second thing only; the persons in whom the heavenly bodies were thought to dwell are not in it, and are to be sought where the relation stood before it was explained. His witness to the pair is not impaired; it is limited to the explanation (Macrob. Saturn. i. 23).

Herodotus refers his meaning to those who have been initiated, and does not himself say who the Cabeiri were, how many they were, or from whom they sprang. He says only that the rite was received by the Samothracians from the Pelasgians and is practised by them in his own day. What the initiated understood is therefore not to be had from this place, and must be collected from the later writers. Entered under the Cabeiri, as the earliest witness in time; the number and the persons to be inquired after in the others.

Strabo ranks the name of the Cabeiri with the names of the ministers, dancers and attendants of the sacred rites, and supposes all of them to have been framed to suit the noise of the instruments. Selden, on the contrary, derives the gods of the Samothracians from a Hebrew word signifying great and mighty, which passed afterwards into the Arabic, and understands them to be the Mighty (de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 4). The two derivations are not of one kind: by the one the name is a sound, by the other a title of power; and the second would make the name older than the rites, the first younger. Which of them is the true I am not able to say, and I make use of neither until the persons themselves are ascertained.

Of the Corybantes there are here two parentages, from Saturn and from Jupiter and Calliopê; and only the second is joined by Strabo to the Cabeiri. Mr. Faber reads the Titans as seven in number and children of Saturn, and reasons from this, and from the Cabeiri being of another stock, that there is very little reason to doubt their identity (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iii.). But an argument from parentage has force only where the parentage is agreed; and in this one place it is given twice. Which of the two the Cabeiri are to be assigned to, if to either, the testimonies at present collected do not determine.

Clement reports that the Corybantes are called Cabiric, and that the rite is announced as the Cabiric mystery (Clem. Alex. Cohort. ad Gent. (Protrept.) c. 2). So far Mr. Faber is supported, who asserts in his third chapter that these companies are one (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iii.). But Clement reports a usage of names; he names neither the Curetes nor the Dioscori, and a name applied to persons is not the same thing as the persons identified. The one fact I take from Mr. Faber; the remainder of his list I leave where it stood.

Philo sets Suduc beside Misor, and gives to the two together the discovery of salt; Taautus is the son of Misor, who is Mizraim (Notebook 12). Mr. Bryant takes the Cabiri for the sons of Sadyc, the just man, and the just man for the patriarch Noah (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Of the Cabiri, Corybantes, Idaei Dactyli, Curetes); Mr. Faber makes Noah and the persons preserved with him the original Cabiri (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.). Philo has no Noah. If his Suduc stand in the same age as Misor, he is not the father of Ham; and if he be the patriarch, the genealogy which places him beside Misor is not that of the sacred text. Which of these is the case I do not see that the passage determines, and the question of the Cabeiri is not advanced by it.

Selden derives a word, Cabar as he reads it, meaning great and mighty, from the Hebrew into the Arabic, and from it the name of the gods of the Samothracians, whom he glosses as the Mighty (de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 4). Mr. Faber's third chapter, of which I copy the heading, asserts that all these companies are one (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iii.). The one speaks of a name, and the other of the companies; and neither tells me their number. Whether the Mighty of Selden are the Cabeiri of Samothrace only, or all whom Mr. Faber names, I leave open. Qu. whether the name, if it be what Selden says, belongs to the companies at all, or to one of them.

Strabo confesses that the ancients were not agreed whether the Cabeiri, the Corybantes, the Curetes, the Idaean Dactyli and the Telchines were the same persons or only kinsmen, and refers the whole inquiry to theology. Mr. Faber decides at once for their identity, and adds to the number the Dioscuri, the Lares, the Penates, the Titans and others (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. iii.); a facility of identification by which it were easy to prove anything of anything. Yet I am not able to affirm that they are distinct. Philo Byblius derives the Cabeiri from Suduc, whose name he interprets the Just, and attributes to them the invention of a ship (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10); which should place them among the deified patriarchs, and near the Deluge: but whether they be the sons of the patriarch, or his company in the vessel, or a priesthood which afterwards bore the name, the testimonies at present collected do not determine. Their number is to be ascertained first. Under which head they are to stand I leave open.

A temple of the Cabeiri stood at Memphis, closed to all but the priest, and its images were destroyed by Cambyses. Mr. Bryant makes the Cabiritic worship to have passed from Egypt to Canaan and Syria, and thence to Greece (Analysis, vol. ii. Of the Cabiri, Corybantes, Idaei Dactyli, Curetes). Herodotus attests the temple. He does not attest the passage; and in his second book (Herod. ii. 51) the Samothracians have the rites from the Pelasgians, who are not said to have had them from Egypt. That the Cabeiri were worshipped in Egypt is one fact; that they were carried from it is another, which Mr. Bryant has not here proved from this witness.

The witnesses are set down in their order. Clement has two. Mr. Bryant has three, as demons (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Of the Cabiri, Corybantes, Idaei Dactyli, Curetes), and again eight, on the authority of Sanchoniathon. Vossius, from an old scholiast, has four, whom he names Axieros, Axiocersa, Axiocersus and Casmilus (Voss. de Theol. Gent. lib. ii.). Mr. Faber reports that Tertullian describes the Samothracian Cabiri as three (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. vi.); but his own reckoning is Noah and the seven persons preserved with him (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.), and the three are only the report of another. These numbers are not to be reduced to one by any means which the places themselves afford, and the testimonies at present collected do not determine which is the number of the Cabeiri, or whether it was the same in every place.

Mr. Faber takes Cadmus not as a hero but as the tutelary god of a nation (Origin of Pagan Idolatry, vol. iii. bk. vi. ch. v.), and says that the Cadmians came into Greece from Egypt or Phenicia, while others stayed in Palestine, the Cadmanites of Moses. If Cadmus is a god of a people, the question is not who he was but what the people were. Of Ceylon and Ava, and of the god worshipped there, I have nothing but his word, and no witness of that country by which to try the identity of the names. Entered, and not adopted. The resemblance of Cadam to Cadmus is of the kind from which it were easy to build much; it is to be seen what else supports it.

The Samothracians take their rites from the Pelasgians. Mr. Faber relates, from ancient writers, that Dardanus established the Mysteries of the Great Gods in Samothrace when a deluge had driven the Arcadians out of Peloponnesus (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. vi.); and this he gives as their report, not as his own finding. Of the two accounts one names a people, and the other a person and a flood. They may be reconciled, if Dardanus be taken to have been of that people; but this is a supposition, and neither place says it. The persons in whose honour the rites were kept remain, in both, unnamed in the passages as I have them.

The towns and farm-houses of Egypt stood on raised ground, and at the flood the cattle were kept in the same villages as the people, with their fodder. It follows that the space of each dwelling was small, and was shared with the beasts for a part of the year. The matter belongs to no head of the present inquiry, and I enter it only because the leaf was open.

The prophet is bidden to set his face against Gog, whom the text calls the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and whose land is Magog. Gog is therefore named as a person, and Magog as his country (Ezek. xxxviii. 1–3). Whether Gog be a proper name or a title of the prince, and in what quarter the land lay, the passage does not say; Meshech and Tubal are set down as under his rule, and no more. More than this the sacred text does not say. To be entered here, and the other places to be compared with it as they are collected.

Here the two names stand together, and stand for the nations in the four quarters of the earth who are to be gathered to battle (Rev. xx. 8). In the prophet Gog is a prince and Magog his land; in this place both are names of the multitude, and the use in the one book is not to be forced upon the other. Whether the writer takes the names from the prophet, or from a tradition common to them both, the text does not determine. Mem. that no people is named in the verse by any name but these.

Cotta, in the third book, gives the count of the Jupiters on the authority of those whom he calls the theologians. Of the three, the first and second are said to be born in Arcadia; for the third, the Cretan, no birth is given in this place, and what is said of him is that he is a son of Saturn and that his tomb is shown in the island (Cic. de Nat. Deor. iii. § 53). The witness distinguishes him, then, as the one who has a grave. It is a Roman witness reporting what others reckoned, and it is not the poet's; I place it beside the poet and do not confound them. Who the theologians were Cotta does not say here, and I do not supply it. Qu. whether the count of three is theirs from the first or the result of joining several accounts.

The poet does not deny the tomb: he says that the Cretans builded it, and denies only that the god died (Callim. Hymn. in Jov. 8, 9). Mr. Bryant, who for the tomb in Crete has two writers before him, argues that it cannot be what they say, because the accounts do not agree about the place: some give the city, some a cavern on Mount Ida, others Mount Jasius; and he concludes that the Cretans cannot have been the authors of the notion (Bryant, Analysis, vol. i. Taph, Tuph, Taphos). The reasoning does not follow. That a death is told with more than one place of burial proves a confusion of the places and leaves the death where it was; and to put the Cretans aside because the sites vary is to reject a tradition for the faults of its localities. He adds that the names of the Grecian deities were titles; of that I say nothing here. Qu. what the several places had in common.

Josephus derives a people from Magog, who are named Magogites after him (Joseph. Antiq. i. 6. § 1). That much is a descent and a name, and is of the same kind as what he gives of Gomer. He adds that the Greeks call these people by another name, which is that of the Scythians; and this is Josephus's identification, which he reports and does not prove. I enter it as his. Whether the people so called by the Greeks are those of whom the prophet speaks as of the land of Magog, his words do not settle. The place to be compared with the prophet's words, and with such as have followed Josephus.

Diodorus has the Curetes dwelling in wooded and broken country for want of houses, and credits them with the keeping of flocks and of bees; and in the same chapter he has them receive the infant Jupiter from his mother and bring him up (Diod. Sic. v. 65). They are called gods by the writers he follows, but nothing that is told of them is told of a god: it is the life of men who have not yet built, and who are remembered for what they taught. He reports that some made them born of the earth and others descended from the Idaean Dactyli; I take the second as keeping a descent, the first as the form which a people gives to an origin it has lost. The nurture of Jupiter among them is entered here only as told. Whether the Curetes are to be reckoned among the Cabeiri is not decided by this chapter. To stand with the deified patriarchs, the Cabeiri reserved.

Mr. Faber undertakes to state Mr. Bryant's system and then to reject it (Origin of Pagan Idolatry, vol. iii. bk. vi. ch. i.). As he reports it, the children of Cush under Nimrod left the orderly settlement of the nations and founded Babylon, so that the Cuthites alone built Babel. Two moderns whom I read are here at issue, and I cannot yet say which is right. His reasons are not entered: they follow, and are to be copied when read. That the opinion he prefers is generally received is a ground for hearing it and not a proof. See Notebook 7, where I asked whether Mr. Bryant had given to one son of Ham what belongs to the whole line.

The Apostle calls the author of the saying a prophet of their own (Tit. i. 12), so that the charge against the Cretans is taken from the Cretans. Of what the island held for its own Mr. Faber concludes that the Cretan bull, the bull of Europa and Pasiphae, the Minotaur, Asterius and Jupiter himself are one character, the great tauric patriarch (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. vi.). So far as this sets the Jupiter whom the Cretans buried among men, and not among the gods, I have no quarrel with it, and the person is to stand with the deified patriarchs. But he goes on to read the Minotaur as Noah, and the seven youths and seven virgins whom Minos compelled the Athenians to send as the number of the Corybantes, the Titans and the Cabeiri, being the complement of the Ark exclusive of Noah; and in this I do not follow him. The number seven is drawn from a fable of the Athenians, and the Cabeiri have their own place, in which it is not to be settled.

Bochart gives the several peoples whom writers have made the descendants of Magog: the Goths, the Celts and Galatians, the Aquitanians, the Germans, the Tartars, and the Scythians; and holds the last to be the truest, having Josephus with him (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. iii. cap. 13; see Notebook 31). The list shews only that the writers were not agreed. He reads the prophet as placing the land of Magog in Scythia (Ezek. xxxviii. 1–3); but the words of the verse name a prince and two peoples, and no country but Magog, so that the placing among the Scythians is Bochart's reading and not the text's. I enter it as his reading, and keep the question of the seat open until the testimonies are collected.

Two things are to be taken from this place of Diodorus, and kept apart. The first is the reason given for the honours: the Dactyli of Crete are said to have found out fire and the working of copper and iron, and for these benefits to the race of men they were honoured as immortal (Diod. Sic. v. 64). The honour follows upon the benefit, and not the benefit upon the honour. The second is the confusion of a name. One of the Dactyli bore the name Heracles in the Greek, and later men, finding the name the same, gave to the son of Alcmenê what he had done. Diodorus himself says of this that the later men thought it; he does not say that they were right. A likeness of name is no proof of one person, and that it should be here confessed by the historian is of more use than a conjecture of mine. Qu. how many of the actions told under that name are to be so divided.

The Cretans shewed a tomb of Jupiter, and are for this called liars by the poet, who will have it that the god did not die. The first words of the reproach are cited by the Apostle (Tit. i. 12) from one whom he calls a prophet of their own. Now a tomb supposes a man; and the tradition of the island, which the poet rejects as impious, is on that very account to be preferred to the poet, as being the less sophisticated. That which was a lie to Callimachus was the remnant of a truth: namely, that he whom the Cretans worshipped had lived and died among men. Whether this person be referred to the family of Ham, or be one of those in whom the memory of the patriarch himself was preserved, is reserved for the excursus.

Bochart makes Magog to be Prometheus, for two reasons: that as Magog is the son of Japheth so Prometheus is the son of Iapetus; and that Prometheus is feigned to have been fixed upon Caucasus, because he or the Scythian nation sprung from him fixed their seats there (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. i. cap. 2). The first is a likeness between two fathers' names. The second takes for granted the point in question, that the people of Magog are Scythians. The prophet joins with Magog those who dwell carelessly in the isles (Ezek. xxxix. 6), and isles are not to be looked for upon Caucasus. I neither adopt this identification nor reject it; the premises are to be separated from the conclusion before it is entered under any head.

Strabo, upon Ephorus, gives the going up to the cave in Crete as the act of a lawgiver who returned with a writing, and cites the poet's line in which Minos held converse with Jupiter. Here are two readings of one thing (Strab. lib. x.). The first has a man, a cave, a nine years' term and a writing brought down; the second has the same term and the same cave, and the writing has become a converse with the god. The former is the relation, and the latter is the poet's making of it, and I take it to be the later. That Minos pretended, as Ephorus thinks, is his inference upon the matter and not the matter; I do not adopt it, and keep only that the cave was a place to which a man went up among men. The Rhadamanthys of whom Strabo speaks is a second man of that name, and is not to be mixed with the brother.

Bochart carries the name further. The Syrians called the city Bambyce, which is also Hierapolis, by the name of Magog; and Magog he takes for the Prometheus of the Greeks, whose son Deucalion consecrated the temple there, as Lucian reports in his book on the Syrian Goddess (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. iii. cap. 13). The city was named either for its founder, or by the Syrians in memory of one thought to have come from the land of Magog. Of these the second supposes a coming, and the first a founder, and neither is attested. If the Magog of Hierapolis be the Magog whom Josephus makes the father of the Scythians, the people were carried from the north into Syria; of the road, in the place before me, nothing is said. The matter of the temple to be taken up under the Waters.

The Cretans relate, in Diodorus, that the Titans lived about Cnosus in the time when the Curetes were young, and that the foundations of a house of Rhea are shewn there still (Diod. Sic. v. 66). It is a dwelling that is pointed out, and a place, and the persons are set in the same age as the Curetes. Bochart, on another matter, has the Cerethites of the Philistine coast to be other than the Cretans of the island, and thinks it likelier that the islanders took the name from the Philistines than the Philistines from the islanders, the Philistines being the older people; he adds that the Greek translators, taking the one for the other, rendered only the sound (Bochart, Chanaan, lib. i. cap. 15). This concerns the name, and the order of the peoples under it. The tradition of the island is not touched by it, nor does Bochart in this place join it to any Jupiter. Qu. whether a people may take a name from another and keep its own account of its dead.

The theologians of Cotta make the Cretan a son of Saturn (Cic. de Nat. Deor. iii. § 53). Bochart, where he sets Canaan beside Mercury, says that each was a son of Jove, that is of Ham (Bochart, Phaleg, lib. i. cap. 2). The two are to be written on one leaf and not joined. Bochart in this place speaks of Jove as Ham, and says it of two persons in the line of Canaan; he does not speak of Crete, nor name Saturn. Cicero names Saturn and Crete and says nothing of Ham. If the Jove of the one and the Cretan of the other were the same, the father of Jupiter would be the father of Ham; but that is an inference from two witnesses who have not met, and I do not make it. Which of the three Jupiters, if any, is the patriarch, the passages as yet collected do not shew. Reserved for the excursus.

Two places, set together for the sake of what they leave out. The first gives the character of the man, just, perfect in his generations, walking with God. The second gives his occupation after the Deluge, that he became an husbandman and planted a vineyard, and what befell him from the wine. Neither speaks of the vessel, of the waters, or of any creature in them; they describe a person and what he did. I enter them first in this series because the matter of the Waters falls into two parts which the heathen relations continually blend: what is told of the man, and what is told of the event. The one is to be tried by these places, the other by those which relate the Deluge itself. Where a tradition retains a husbandman who planted, it retains the man; where it retains the flood and the vessel, it retains the event. Whether any tradition retains both is not to be assumed.

The relation of the Greeks, as Lucian says he heard it from them. One man is saved, for his wisdom and piety; he goes into an ark of great size with his children and his wives. The ground of the saving answers to that which the sacred text gives of Noah (Gen. vi. 9), and the ark, the family and the creatures are all retained. It is for this reason the nearest to the sacred history of any heathen relation that I have yet entered; it is not on that account to be taken for the earliest, and the identity of the saved man with Noah rests on the agreement of the circumstances and on nothing in the name. Lucian gives it as one of two (see the following leaf).

The men of Hierapolis tell it otherwise. A chasm opened in their country and took the water, and Deukalion, on that occasion, raised altars and founded a temple above it; Lucian reports the chasm and its small size, and in the place copied says nothing of the water going down it. Here is no vessel and no company of beasts; what remains is the event as a draining, with the founder of a temple. I do not harmonise it with the relation copied before (Lucian. de Dea Syria, c. 12) by supplying an ark which the text does not name. The relations are two, and each is local; they agree in the person and in the temple, and differ in the manner.

Philo Byblius, in the fragment of Sanchoniatho which Eusebius has preserved, makes Dagon a son of Heaven and Earth and the discoverer of corn and of the plough, and renders the name by Siton; whence it is evident that the Phenicians themselves referred it to dagan, corn. Selden pronounces that Philo blundered (hallucinatus est), and that he ought to have derived it from the fish (see Notebook 3); and between these derivations it has been usual to choose. Mr. Faber alone, so far as I have observed, retains both, by referring both to the person of Noah, who was a husbandman, and whom he supposes to be figured in the fish (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.). But this is to confound two modes of corruption which it is the business of the present inquiry to keep distinct, and to ascribe to the man what belongs to the event. Qu. whether the fish be not the vessel, and the corn the seed which it preserved? If this can be established, no choice is required, and neither Selden nor Philo is in error except by omission. The proof to be drawn out at length under the Waters. The objections to be collected first.

Philo relates that the stories which precede in his fragment were allegorized by Thabion, the first hierophant of the Phenicians, and mixed up with the physical and cosmical phenomena, and so delivered to the prophets who celebrated the orgies. It follows from the words that the stories were before the allegory; and the passage names the person and the order in which the physical reading was laid upon them, and the persons to whom it was handed. This is the only place I have met in which an ancient author dates one reading of the fables and says by whom it was made. What the stories were before Thabion touched them Philo does not say here. To stand with the Mysteries, where the delivery to the prophets is to be considered.

At Ascalon, beside a lake full of fish, a goddess whom the Syrians call Derceto: the head a woman's, and the whole of the rest a fish's. Two moderns dispose of her differently. Mr. Bryant makes her the same deity as Dagon, styled Atargatis, and worshipped under the same mixed figure (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). Mr. Faber makes her the mate of Dagon, as the Babylonian fish-god Oan had his goddess (Origin of Pagan Idolatry, vol. i. bk. i. ch. iv.). The testimony names a goddess and a lake, and in the place copied no Dagon. Whether she is Dagon in another sex, or his companion, it does not determine; I enter both opinions and decide neither.

Lucian saw the semblance of Derceto in Phenicia, a woman to the thighs and a fish below; the effigy at Hierapolis he describes as a complete woman. Selden has the same, and lays down that unless the goddess be half fish she is by no means to be called Derceto (Nisi vero semipiscis fuerit, Derceto nequaquam appellanda; Selden, de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 3). He notes also that the great writers give the Hierapolitan goddess this name. By his own rule, then, the name has gone from the image which bears it to one which does not. Lucian says that he saw the one; he does not say that the other was made after it. The two are not to be entered under a single head because one name is used of both.

The story as it is given by the most learned of the inhabitants. Venus, offended, inspires the goddess with a passion for a youth; she bears a child, kills the youth, and, from shame and grief, casts herself into the lake and is changed into a fish. The fish is here a consequence: a punishment, or a refuge, and the water is a lake and not a flood. It has the character of a relation framed to give a cause to a form already in the precinct; that the form was framed upon the relation is not impossible, and nothing in the place copied determines which. Of the Deluge it says nothing. I do not on that account say that the fish of this goddess has nothing to do with it.

The Chaldean account. A creature in the form of a fish, having the head and the feet of a man beneath, comes up out of the sea, and teaches the Babylonians letters, the building of cities, and (which is the point to be observed) the distinguishing of seeds and the gathering of fruits; and at sunset returns into the deep. Selden brings this place to the illustration of Dagon; and Mr. Faber, after him, takes the Odacon of the same fragments for a corruption of that name: which, as resting upon a supposed error of transcription, I neither adopt nor reject. It is sufficient for the present purpose that here also the fish and the grain are found together, and among another people than the Phenicians of Philo; so that the conjunction cannot well be laid to the account of a single etymology. The instruction in letters and in laws is to be separated, as belonging to another mode, and is not to be pressed. Refer to Notebook 36.

Phurnutus names the goddess of the Syrians Atargatis. Three derivations of the name are now before me, the writers taking Derceto and Atargatis for one. Selden brings it from Addirdaga, a great or mighty fish (Selden, de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 3). Mr. Faber, from Adar-Daga, the illustrious fish (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.). Mr. Bryant, from Atar or Athar, the same as On and Osiris, with Gatus or Catus, a fish (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). They differ in the first part of the word and agree in the second. The opening sounds of Atar, Adar and Addirdaga are near enough to carry any of the three senses, and I decide none. That the last part is a fish I do not dispute; what the fish is remains to be shewn.

The Syrians honour the goddess by abstaining from the dove and the fish. That the two creatures are named together I enter without inference. Mr. Bryant states that the dove which returned to Noah with a leaf of olive was held in many nations as particularly sacred, a messenger of the Deity, and that its name among the ancient Amonians (his term) was Ion or Ionah (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). The Syrian abstention would stand as one instance of the sanctity of the dove. Whether it is an instance of the Deluge also I cannot say, since the abstention is reported with no reason that I can copy; the clause which follows in my text is doubtful, and I leave it.

Berosus relates that part of the vessel remains in Armenia, and that the people scrape the bitumen from it for a remedy and a charm. The vessel is here a thing, coated with bitumen and kept in a place; it is not a figure and not a goddess. Mr. Faber, in the chapter on the Cabeiri (Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.), makes Derceto or Atargatis a personification of the lunar Ark, the receptacle of the gods, and Dagon another title of Noah, represented like Derceto with a human body ending in the tail of a fish. The same figure is thus made to signify the vessel in the goddess and the man in the god, according as the argument requires. For this I find no warrant in the passage before me; it is a further instance of the confusion noted in Notebook 36.

Lucian reports a founder, Semiramis, who dedicated the temple not to Juno but to her own mother, whose name was Derceto. Vossius, in the argument of his chapter, has various opinions out of Lucian on the founder of the temple, and takes the Syrian goddess, with Atergatis or Derceto, to signify the Earth together with the Moon, and all nature subject to the Moon (Voss. de Theol. Gent. lib. ii. cap. 55). In the argument as I have it the founder is a person and the goddess a part of nature: who built the house is answered from history, and who is worshipped in it from physics. Nothing in what Lucian reports makes the mother of Semiramis a part of nature; she is a mother, and her name is Derceto. To stand with the physical readings, which are of a later mode.

Mr. Bryant reads Dagon as Dag-On, the God On in the semblance of a fish, the chief deity of Gath and Ascalon and of many cities of Syria, with the upper parts of a man (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). On is the Egyptian title of Osiris; and the inventions credited to Dagon, the plough and bread corn, being credited also to Zeuth and to Osiris, he pronounces all the same Deity. Philo, however, gives Dagon the name of Zeus Arotrios (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10). If a common invention makes Dagon Osiris, it makes him with equal right Jupiter, and Jupiter and Osiris are then one; which is to suppose beforehand what the argument is to prove. Mr. Bryant brings the fish and the corn together, and explains their meeting by the sameness of the god. I enter the instance; the explanation I do not take. See Notebook 36.

Mr. Bryant recalls that he has noticed many temples and cities built in memory of the Ark and Deluge, and others manifestly denominated from Noah; and that an ark or ship was a sacred emblem in the rites of Isis and Osiris (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). The division of what commemorates the event from what takes its name from the man is his own, and I adopt it. The relation of the men of Hierapolis supplies a temple of the first class: it stands above the chasm which took the waters, and was founded on that occasion. It is not among those which Mr. Bryant names in the place copied; I do not say that he has omitted it, the passage being a recapitulation of what is shewn elsewhere. See Notebook 35.

Sir William Jones has translated from the Bhagavat the narrative of the principal event in the life of Satyavrata, which is the subject of the first Purana, that of the Matsya, or Fish; and he says that the appearance of a horned fish to the religious monarch was Maya, or delusion (Jones, Asiatick Researches, vol. i. 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India'). I have this relation only through Sir William Jones, and know nothing of the originals beyond what he gives. A fish, then, stands in a relation of the Deluge from India, as beasts come to the saved man in the relation of the Greeks (Lucian. de Dea Syria, c. 12). I set them side by side. That the fish is called delusion is the relator's gloss, and is not to be pressed into the present matter.

Sir William Jones takes a king of India, of divine birth, eminent for his piety, whose story seems evidently to be that of Noah, to be the Saturn of Italy; he names him Menu, or Satyavrata, and suspects that all the fourteen Menus are reducible to one, called Nuh by the Arabs (Jones, Asiatick Researches, vol. i. 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India'). He offers it as a conjecture. In the Chaldean relation Cronus, that is Saturn, is the Deity who warns the saved man; the saved man is Xisuthrus, and he is not Cronus. By this witness, then, Saturn is the author of the warning and not the person warned, and the identification is not borne out; nor is it contradicted, for one name may have been given to both. I note the difference and draw no more. The relation from India, which I have at second hand, is not to be corrected by the Chaldean, nor the Chaldean bent to the Indian.

Of the customs which the Egyptians hold contrary to the rest of mankind: the men stay at home and weave; and what is unseemly, though necessary, is done within doors, while meat is eaten in the street. From this it may be collected that the house was kept for the loom and for what was not to be done in sight, and that the accommodation was narrow. The place falls under no head of the inquiry, and I enter it all the same, as a mark of the manners of the people among whom the tradition was longest kept.

Mr. Bryant holds the Patriarch to be the principal person in the histories of Berosus and others, represented with two heads, described as an animal of the sea endowed with reason, and depicted as a fish (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum). Mr. Faber says that the four Babylonian Oans reduce to two, Adam and Noah (Origin of Pagan Idolatry, vol. i. bk. i. ch. iv.). In the same Berosus the Deluge is given to Xisuthrus, a king, the son of Ardates, with his vessel and his company; the creature of the sea is given elsewhere, in the first year (see Notebook 37). I find in the relation two persons, and the identification is made by the commentator and is not in the text. I do not say that it cannot be made, but only that it is a premise to be proved before it is a ground.

Philo gives Dagon as Siton. Selden, in his chapter on Dagon, says that Philo seems to have blundered in deriving the name from corn when he should have derived it from the fish; and in the same chapter, concerning Atergatis, he rejects certain etymologies reported from other writers as laughable and contrary to Philo of Byblos, and derives the goddess from the fish (Selden, de Dis Syris, synt. ii. cap. 3). He thus appeals to Philo against his rivals in one place and charges him with error in another. In the places before me he has not distinguished the matter in which Philo is to be trusted from that in which he is to be blamed, and without that distinction his choice of the fish rests on his preference alone. I enter Philo's rendering as it stands, and the fish as Selden's choice.

The historian speaks of one observance only: that no wool is brought into the temples of Egypt nor buried with the dead, and that those who are partakers of the rites which the Greeks call Orphic and Bacchic are under the same rule. He says that these are in fact Egyptian. I do not carry the sentence beyond the observance to which it is attached; but it is the testimony of a Greek that a rite going by the name of a Greek founder was, in the matter of its rule of dress, an Egyptian rite, and so far it is to be entered with the Egyptian Mysteries. He adds that there is a sacred legend about this, and does not give it.

Bishop Warburton holds that the first and original Mysteries known were those of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, and that they passed from thence to the Greeks; and he holds also that the Mysteries were the invention of the legislator (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4). The first of these is what Herodotus relates, and with a named agency: the daughters of Danaus brought the rite out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women, and it was afterwards lost among the people of the Peloponnese save where the Arcadians kept it. Of the second the passage has nothing. A rite that is brought and taught is carried; it is not thereby shewn to have been contrived, and the historian, who says that he knows the truth of the matter, withholds it, so that what the Egyptians delivered is not to be had from him. The place to be set against the learned prelate on the question of contrivance.

The fables of the Egyptians, as Plutarch gives the matter, are not the doctrine but the covering of it. The order was admitted to a philosophy which it concealed for the most part in relations having in them the hints and resemblances of truth, and the Sphinxes before the temples are set there to shew that its theology was a learning of that kind. 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. (Plut. de Is. et Osir.)

The learned prelate holds that the lawgivers, having established a general providence, went on to inculcate a future state of rewards and punishments, and that this was by the invention of the Mysteries (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4). He holds also that the secret of the greater Mysteries was the unity of God and the exposure of polytheism, and that the Greek and Asiatic Mysteries were borrowed from the Egyptian. I set these down together and do not yet see how they stand. A lawgiver who invents a rite, and a priesthood that delivers one as it received it, are not the same agent; and which of the two is meant in Egypt, where the rite is said to have begun, the passage does not say. Reserved for the tractate.

Diodorus here gives, as I read the place, what the Egyptian priests themselves claim, and I record it as their claim. Orpheus is a bringer. The Greek gods that bear the rites are the Egyptian under other names: Osiris is Dionysus, Isis is the same as Demeter, and the names alone have been exchanged. The learned prelate says that the Mysteries were passed to the Greeks under the presidency of various gods, as the institutor thought most for his purpose (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4). The Egyptians as Diodorus has them speak of a change of name and say nothing of a purpose; so far as the testimony goes, the god differs in the Greek rite and the rite does not. Mem. to look for the other witnesses to the Greek names.

Origen distinguishes two orders in Egypt: the learned, who reason upon what is held divine among them, and the vulgar, who hear the relations without the reasons of them. A traveller who has sat with the latter only, he says, knows nothing of the Egyptian knowledge, however he may suppose it. The learned prelate cites Origen with Celsus for the end of the Mysteries (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4). The place here copied does not speak of the end; it speaks of where the doctrine was kept, which was with the priests, and to be had by association with them. It is to be added that the one who reasons from what is shewn to the people has not the doctrine of Egypt. (Orig. cont. Cels. lib. i.)

The priest says that the power who presides over the true science of the Gods is one, and that the inventions of the priests' wisdom were dedicated to him. To dedicate a writing is not to have composed it; the name written upon it is the name of the order's patron, and does not tell us the hand. This is the manner in which the Egyptians, so far as the testimony shews, kept their learning, and it is to be classed with the ascriptions of the Greeks, which are to be read as ascriptions and not as the reports of an author. My ancestor places Hermes the Egyptian in the most ancient times, about the two-thousandth year from the creation, and on that account denies that the book which goes about under his name can be his (Is. Casaub. Exercit. i. § 10). Whether the writings of which the priest speaks are those which now bear the name, I do not determine; the testimonies at present collected do not reach it. The place to be examined again when the Mysteries are taken in order.

The historian says that the Egyptians were the first to hold that the soul is immortal, and that certain Greeks have used the doctrine as their own; and he withholds the names. A doctrine so delivered is a received doctrine, and the Greeks who took it up are its borrowers. Huet holds that Hebrew doctrine came to the Greeks through the Phenicians and the Egyptians (Huet, Demonstr. Evang. prop. iv. cap. 3). The stages are in the order that the historian's relation would suit; but he names no stage beyond Egypt, and the word first is his own account of what he knew, which is not a witness to what the Egyptians had themselves received. Qu. whether it was held in Egypt from the beginning. I do not say that it was, nor that it was not.

The Roman holds the Mysteries of the Athenians to be the best of what that city has brought into the life of men, and names two benefits: that men were softened out of a savage life, and that they had a better hope in dying. The second is the end which the learned prelate assigns to all the Mysteries, the doctrine of a future state (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4), and I allow that this witness is consistent with him upon it. But the place is silent on the origin of the rite: it does not say that the Athenians received it from Egypt, and it does not say that a legislator contrived it for the use of the state. It is therefore to be reckoned neither for nor against the learned prelate on the question of origin.

The narrator says that he was initiated, and that he cannot tell what was said and done; what he does tell is that he drew near to the gates of Proserpina, and returned, and saw the gods celestial and infernal and worshipped them. The learned prelate holds that the secret of the greater Mysteries was the unity of the Godhead (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4). This witness does not bear on it, for it gives the fact of the rite and keeps the matter. I enter it as a testimony to the reserve and no more. The testimonies at present collected from the initiated do not determine what the secret was.

The Scepsian denies that any mystic story of the Cabeiri is told in Samothrace; Stesimbrotus places their rites there; and the same writer derives their name from a mountain. A name taken from a place may be older than the persons or younger, and the passage does not say which. Entered under Samothrace (Strab. lib. x.), and to be set beside Notebook 27, where the same book is copied. Whether the Cabeiri were named from the mountain, or the mountain from them, I leave open.

Two genealogies, and in neither is the number of the Cabeiri more than three; but in the second the Cyrbantes are nine, and are said to have dwelt in Samothrace. Whether the nine are the Cabeiri under another name, or a company beside them, the passage does not say. The father in both is Vulcan (Strab. lib. x.). The number is to be ascertained before any identity is affirmed with other companies, and I do not here ascertain it.

Their names are kept secret; Strabo therefore gives none, and the number cannot be had from him. The temple at Memphis, which he reports on the authority of Herodotus, is entered from Herodotus himself in Notebook 27. Memorandum: that the Cabeiri are honoured in the islands and in the Troad, and at Memphis, proves the extent of the worship and nothing yet of its origin. Under which head they stand is not determined.

Herodotus derives the rites of Samothrace from the Pelasgians, and does not say whence the Pelasgians had them (Herod. ii. 51). He speaks as one initiated, or as expecting the initiated to understand him, and says no more. The rites of Samothrace are therefore not taken from the account entered in Notebook 27 by this testimony; whether they are so by another, that leaf does not decide. Copied for the place only.

By this relation the physical interpretation was laid upon the stories by a hierophant, and delivered by him to the prophets who celebrated the orgies; it did not make the stories. The order is worth keeping: the tradition first, the physical reading after (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10). I enter it so, as Philo gives it, and prefer it to a reading of the heathen fables that begins from the sun.

Seven Cabeiri, with an eighth brother, and all sons of Suduc; Strabo's genealogies at Notebook 52 give three, or three and three. The numbers do not agree and I do not reconcile them. Here the Cabeiri are scribes at the command of another, and the things recorded are the things of Saturn and of Egypt (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10). Compare Notebook 27. Whether they are the sons of one man, or a company bearing a name, remains where Notebook 27 left it.

Clement gives a man, Eetion, as the founder of the rites of Samothrace, and counts them imposture (Clem. Alex. Cohort. ad Gent. (Protrept.) c. 2). He does not name the Cabeiri in the place, and I do not enter it as testimony upon them; it bears only upon the rites of the island, which Herodotus ascribes to the Pelasgians (Notebook 54). The two accounts of the founder are not the same, and I do not attempt to join them. The Cabeiri, their number and their head, are as they were.

Plutarch reports that many have held a certain goddess the daughter of Hermes, and that this Hermes is esteemed the author of letters and music (Plut. de Is. et Osir.). He reports it of others and does not say that he holds it himself. To stand with the deified patriarchs, if he who first made letters was a man and not a power; the testimonies are not yet gathered which would decide it, and I make no entry here beyond the place.

Herodotus, who holds that nearly all the names of the gods came to Hellas from Egypt, excepts the names here copied, and adds that he reports only what the Egyptians themselves say. The tractate must therefore take the relation as the Egyptian account of the names, and must not extend it to the rites or to the doctrine. Bishop Warburton denies that the Egyptian priests invented the hieroglyphics to hide their wisdom from the vulgar, and allows that they did at length so employ them (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. iv. sect. 4). So far as he parts the first use from the later concealment, this agrees with what the tractate requires, that the concealing came after the thing concealed. But he speaks of writing and Herodotus of names; the one is not to be made to support the other; and the learned prelate's concession that the priests did at length conceal is not a ground upon which the tractate can rest.

The Alexandrian distinguishes three kinds of Egyptian writing, the Epistolographic, the Hieratic and the Hieroglyphic, to be learned in that order; and divides the last into the literal and the Symbolic, and the Symbolic again into three. Of these three it is the last only that he describes as allegorical and as using enigmas (Clem. Alex. Strom. lib. v.). The sacred writing is therefore not all of it enigma on the Alexandrian's account, and the question whether the figures were framed to hide a doctrine or only to record it can be put, in the first place, only of that one kind. What the literal kind of the Hieroglyphic was, he does not here say, and I do not find that any other testimony at present collected says it. For the tractate; the classification to stand first, and the question of concealment to follow it.

The Alexandrian affirms concealment in the Egyptian enigmas, and in the same chapter reads the figures of the temple at Diospolis together as a single sentence of religion (Clem. Alex. Strom. lib. v.). Bishop Warburton, who calls it the general sentiment of antiquity that the priests invented the hieroglyphics to hide their wisdom from the vulgar, would have him among the ancients so mistaken (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. iv. sect. 4). But the Alexandrian says that the Egyptian enigmas are like the Hebrew in respect to concealment; he does not say by whom, or to what end, the figures were first devised. A sentence of this kind is written to be read. Qu. whether what is in such a case concealed be the doctrine, or only the manner of putting it; the testimonies at present collected do not determine. The place to be settled with the other witnesses in the tractate.

Horapollo gives one figure for several things, God among them, and for the hawk two reasons, the nature of the bird and its likeness to the sun, with a preference for the second only by the word "perhaps" (Horapoll. Hierogl. lib. i.). The Alexandrian also makes the hawk the symbol of God (Clem. Alex. Strom. lib. v.; see Notebook 57). Bishop Warburton supposes the picture to have been abridged in three ways at three periods, and names as the first the taking of the principal circumstance for the whole, for which he cites Horapollo (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. iv. sect. 4). The hawk is not a circumstance taken for a subject. If it stands for God, it does so by a reason, and the reasons are those of the interpreter, not shewn to be those of the Egyptians who framed the figure. The solar reason is the one to be examined last. The figure itself I take to be old; the explanation I do not know to be so.

Iamblichus, in the person of the Egyptian priest, affirms that the ancients inscribed all their writings with the name of Hermes, as the common possession of the priesthood. Bishop Warburton, who supposes the Mysteries to have been invented by the legislators for the uses of the state, and their secret to have been the unity of the Godhead (Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4), has not sufficiently weighed this testimony. A doctrine which the priests delivered under one name from the beginning, and as received, was not invented by the magistrate; nor is that properly a secret which the whole order held in common. The learned prelate has mistaken the keeping of a deposit for the contrivance of a policy. For the tractate; and vide the Exercitationes of my ancestor (Exercit. i. § 10) on the writings which bear the name of Hermes.

Apuleius describes books of two kinds in the temple, the one in unknown characters and the other in figures of beasts, and says that they could not be read by the profane (Apul. Metam. lib. xi.). The passage is spoken by a narrator of himself, in a tale of the author's own composing, and is to be taken as fable before it is taken as testimony to the usage of the priests. If it be allowed to stand, it is a witness only to a concealing. Bishop Warburton grants that the Egyptians did at length employ the figures so (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. iv. sect. 4). It does not say how long the books had been so kept. Qu. whether the two kinds here answer to the Hieratic and the Hieroglyphic of the Alexandrian (see Notebook 57). The tractate may mention the passage and must not build upon it.

Diodorus gives Hermes an office about the king, scribe and counsellor, and names no book as his. My ancestor sets passages of the Poemander beside the Gospel of John, says that no true Christian needs to be told from what fountain they were drawn, and asks whether a pagan Egyptian older than Moses could have known the Word, the Son of God (Is. Casaub. Exercit. i. § 10). The Hermes of the counsel and the Hermes of the Poemander are therefore to be kept apart in the tractate: from an office no book follows. How the name came to stand upon writings is noted at Notebook 58. Qu. whether the tradition of the priestly counsellor be older than the writings; the testimonies at present collected do not determine.

Plutarch says that the soldier who became a priest was admitted to a philosophy already possessed by the order, and that its genius was to conceal the greater part in tales (Plut. de Is. et Osir.). The thing concealed is therefore prior to the concealing, and was received, not made, by him who was admitted. Bishop Warburton grants that the Egyptians did at length employ the hieroglyphics to conceal (Warburton, Div. Leg. b. iv. sect. 4); but Plutarch speaks of concealment by tales and not by figures, and the two modes are not to be confounded. The inscription at Sais is the veil spoken of. Whether the tales are to be reckoned with the literary fable or with the tradition, I have not determined. See Notebook 57.

Herodotus says that the practices called Orphic and Bacchic are in fact Egyptian and Pythagorean, and so makes the Greek name the later and the Egyptian rite the source (Herod. ii. 81). He names the rule and withholds the reason, which he says is in a sacred legend. Whether the rule came to Egypt from an older tradition, or began there, the passage does not show; it is evidence of the direction in which the rite passed, and of no more. To stand with the other testimonies of borrowing from Egypt, and not yet under the head of the primeval tradition.