Clavis Mythologiarum

ADVERTISEMENT.

The following pages, which it had not been my intention to separate from a larger work long in preparation, and in which the reader will find, I fear, rather the indication of a method than the full application of it, owe their appearance at the present time to a consideration which, though it may seem to some insufficient, I have not felt myself at liberty to disregard: namely, that certain testimonies respecting the origin and the secret of the Egyptian Mysteries, which in the course of that larger inquiry I have had occasion to bring together, bear so directly upon the opinion of the late Bishop of Gloucester in the second book of his Divine Legation of Moses,1 that to withhold them until the whole could be presented in its proper order were to leave unexamined, for a period which the nature of the undertaking does not permit me to determine, an opinion which has been received, not without some appearance of reason, by the generality of those who have since written upon the subject. NB-44-039 NB-58-008

It is necessary, therefore, to state at the outset what is, and what is not, here undertaken. I do not propose to examine the whole of the learned prelate's argument, of which the Mysteries form but a part, and which is directed to an end with which the present inquiry has no concern. Of the four assertions which he makes respecting the Mysteries themselves, namely, that they were invented by the legislators; that their secret was the unity of the Godhead; that their end was to teach the doctrine of a future state; and that the first and original of them were those of Egypt, from whence they were derived to the Greeks,2 I shall be found to allow the third and the fourth, to qualify the second, and to deny the first; and since the denial of the first draws after it, as will appear, a different account of the second, the reader will not be surprised that the greater part of what follows should be occupied with these two, and that the remaining two, in which I have the satisfaction of agreeing with so considerable a writer, should be dismissed with a brevity proportioned rather to the extent of the agreement than to the importance of the subject. NB-44-039 NB-43-012 NB-46-009 NB-48-003

Whence the doctrine which the Mysteries preserved was itself derived, is a question which belongs to the larger work, and which I do not here so much as attempt; it will be sufficient for the present purpose if it be shown that the testimonies of the ancients, when they are suffered to speak for themselves, and not, as has been too commonly the case among those who are more ready to construct than to collect, made to speak the language of a system, describe the Mysteries as a thing received, carried and kept, and nowhere, so far as I have been able to discover, as a thing contrived.3 If this be granted, the rest will follow in its order; if it be not granted, the objections which may be urged against it, and which I do not affect to underrate, will be found considered, with such fullness as the limits of a tractate admit, in the sections which follow. NB-58-008 NB-43-012 NB-45-004

Footnotes

  1. Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4. The Bishop calls the Mysteries "the most sacred Part of Pagan Religion; and framed to strike most forcibly and deep into the Minds and Imaginations of the People." The place is cited throughout from the edition in which I have read it; I have not thought it necessary to compare the later impressions, the argument, so far as it concerns the present question, being the same in all that I have seen. ↩

  2. Warburton, Div. Leg. b. ii. sect. 4. The first assertion is in the words "This was by the Invention of the Mysteries"; the second, that "The Egyptian Mystagogues in their secret Rites, taught the Unity of the Godhead"; the third, that "The Nature and End of these were all the same, to teach the Doctrine of a future State"; the fourth, that "The first and original Mysteries, of which we have any Account, were those of Isis and Osiris in Egypt." I have preferred to give his own words, lest I should be thought to have stated an opinion in order to refute it more conveniently. ↩

  3. The words of Herodotus (Herod. ii. 171), of Diodorus (Diod. Sic. i. 96) and of Iamblichus (Iambl. de Myst. sect. i. cap. 1) are examined in the second section; it will be observed that in none of them is the rite said to have been framed by a legislator, and that in the first two it is said to have been brought and taught, in the third to have been held in common by the whole order. The word which Iamblichus employs of the writings of the priests, and which may seem at first sight to tell against me, is considered in its place. I lay no stress upon the agreement of three writers so widely separated in age and in purpose, beyond observing that it is not the less deserving of notice on that account. ↩

← THE EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES:SECTION I. OF THE ASSERTIONS OF THE LEARNED PRELATE, AS THEY ARE TO BE EXAMINED. →