THE EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES:

OR, SOME INDICATIONS, LATELY TRACED, WHEREBY CERTAIN ASSERTIONS OF THE LATE BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER, IN HIS DIVINE LEGATION OF MOSES, RESPECTING THE ORIGIN AND THE SECRET OF THOSE RITES, MAY BE CORRECTED.

BY THE REV. EDWARD CASAUBON, RECTOR OF LOWICK.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR. 1830.

Integrum Commentarium non aggressus fui, nempe conscius quid valeant humeri. (I did not undertake an entire Commentary, being conscious what my shoulders could bear.) — Samuel Wesley, Dissertationes in librum Jobi (dissertations on the book of Job) (London, 1736), Prolegomena, § 2.

MANIBUS ISAACI CASAUBONI, VIRI DOCTISSIMI, QUI SCRIPTA QUAE HERMETIS NOMINE FERUNTUR AD EXAMEN REVOCAVIT, HAEC DE MYSTERIIS AEGYPTIORUM QUALIACUMQUE, EX EADEM GENTE ORIUNDUS, D. D. D. E. C.¹

Editor's headnote

The Egyptian Mysteries (the title of the tractate) is the second of Casaubon's two finished works, after the pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology (Testimonia 4). He wrote it at Lowick in the first months of 1830, after the return from Rome, with Dorothea Casaubon reading aloud and copying in the library (Testimonia 24), and it was printed in the same year. Within the year he could speak of "my late tractate on the Egyptian Mysteries" (Testimonia 28). It is short by his measure, and it is the only text in which his method can be seen carried through to the end of an argument.

The text is that of the copy kept with the Lowick Notebooks. Casaubon's notes are numbered as he numbered them. The present editor's notes are marked e1, e2 and so on, and are kept to fact. On the web, each paragraph links to the notebook records it was written from; every one of them is dated 1830 or earlier. Casaubon quotes in English only from versions printed in his lifetime (the Authorized Version, Adlington's Apuleius, Thomas Taylor's Iamblichus) or gives his own English; elsewhere he reports the sense. The records print fuller versions of the same passages and name their translators.