SECTION II. OF THE ORIGIN OF THE MYSTERIES: THAT THEY ARE REPRESENTED BY THE ANCIENTS AS RECEIVED, AND NOT AS CONTRIVED.

The testimonies which bear upon the origin of the Mysteries, so far as I have been able to collect them, may be distributed, for the convenience of examination, into three classes: first, those which relate the carrying of particular rites out of Egypt into Greece; secondly, those which relate the possession by the Egyptians of a doctrine which the Greeks afterwards held; and thirdly, that which professes to give the account of the Egyptian priesthood itself respecting the source of its learning. I shall take them in this order, which is not that of their authority, but that in which the force of each is best perceived; and I shall reserve to the close of the section the consideration of a passage which may be thought to make against the conclusion, and which, since I have no wish to escape it, I shall examine at greater length than its weight perhaps deserves.¹ NB-43-012 NB-45-004 NB-58-008 NB-56-001

Of the first class the chief is the relation of Herodotus respecting the rite which the Egyptians performed by night upon a lake, and which, as he says, they themselves call the Mysteries. The historian declares that he could say more of it, as one who knew the truth, but that he will keep silence; and he extends the same silence to the rite of Demeter which the Greeks call the Thesmophoria, saying only so much of it as he was not forbidden to say, namely, that the daughters of Danaus brought it out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women, and that it was afterwards lost, when the Dorians drove out the people of the Peloponnese, except among the Arcadians, who were not driven out.² Now it is to be observed, in the first place, that the persons by whom the rite is said to have been brought are not legislators but women, and that it is to women that they are said to have taught it; and in the second place, that the rite is represented as a thing which could be lost and which was in one place preserved: neither of which circumstances accords with the supposition of an institution framed by the magistrate for the uses of the state, which would have been renewed by the authority that framed it, and would have perished, if it perished at all, with the state, and not with a people. NB-43-012

With this agrees, though it is of a different kind, what the same historian relates concerning the use of wool. The Egyptians, he says, bring nothing woollen into their temples, nor are buried in it, this being accounted impious; and in this they agree with the rites which are called Orphic and Bacchic, but which are in truth Egyptian and Pythagorean; of the reason he says only that there is a sacred relation concerning it.³ I do not lay more weight upon this place than it will bear. It establishes no more than that a particular observance of the Greek rites was Egyptian before it was Greek, and that its reason was withheld; but it establishes so much, and it establishes it in a form which is precisely the reverse of that which the learned prelate's account would require: for here the observance is found first, and the reason, which the institutor of a policy would have been the first to declare, is the last thing that is told, and is not told at all. NB-43-006

Of the second class it is sufficient to adduce two places of the same writer. In the one he affirms, upon his own inquiry, that the names of nearly all the gods came to the Greeks from Egypt, and he adds, with a caution which it were well if later writers had imitated, that he says no more than the Egyptians themselves say;⁴ in the other he relates that the Egyptians were the first who held the immortality of the soul, and that there were Greeks, some earlier and some later, who had made use of that doctrine as if it had been their own, whose names he knows but will not record.⁵ Both places describe a doctrine passing from one people to another, and in both the Greeks appear as those who received it. I do not infer from the second, as a less cautious writer might be tempted to infer, that the Egyptians were the authors of the doctrine which they are said to have been the first to hold; the word is the historian's, and it is a report of what he could ascertain, not a testimony to what the Egyptians had themselves received. Whence they had it, is a question which the present tractate does not undertake to answer, and which is reserved, with the opinion of Huet upon the same subject,⁶ to its proper place. NB-10-006 NB-11-005 NB-47-015 NB-57-003

To the same class belongs the account of Diodorus, which is the more important as it names the person by whom the rites were brought into Greece. Orpheus, he says, brought out of Egypt the greater part of his mystic ceremonies, and the rites which were celebrated in his wanderings, and the relation of what he had seen in the place of the dead; for the rite of Osiris is the same with that of Dionysus, and the rite of Isis very like to that of Demeter, the names only having been exchanged.⁷ It is to be observed that the historian here reports the claim of the Egyptian priests, and not his own judgment; but the claim, whatever be its value, is a claim to have given and not to have been invented upon, and it is the more deserving of attention because it is made by those who, upon the learned prelate's supposition, had the strongest interest in representing their rites as the contrivance of their own legislators. It is further to be observed, that in this relation the rite remains the same in passing, and the name alone is changed: whereas the learned prelate's account of the same transmission is, that the Mysteries were derived to the Greeks "under the Presidency of various Gods, as the Institutor thought most for his purpose."⁸ The one account describes a translation, the other a policy; and between the two it is not difficult to determine which has the support of the witness. NB-45-004

I come now to the passage which I have undertaken to consider, and which, if it were a testimony, would undoubtedly be a testimony against me. Clement of Alexandria, in the course of his exhortation against the rites of the heathen, invokes perdition upon the author of the imposture, whether it were Dardanus, who taught the mysteries of the mother of the gods, or Eetion, who instituted the orgies and mysteries of the Samothracians, or the Phrygian Midas, who learned the deceit from Odrysus and communicated it to his subjects.⁹ Here, it may be said, is an institutor named in express terms, and by a writer who cannot be suspected of any partiality to the rites which he condemns. To this I answer, first, that the writer is not a witness to the origin of the rites but an accuser of their authors, whose purpose is less to inform the reader whence the rites came than to fix upon some person the guilt of having introduced them; secondly, that he names three such persons, and names them in the alternative, which is as much as to confess that he did not know which of them was the author; thirdly, that of the three the last is said to have learned what he communicated, so that even in the accuser's account the rite is found to have existed before the person who is charged with it; and lastly, that to institute a rite in a particular place is one thing, and to invent the doctrine which the rite preserves is another, and that of the second Clement does not here say anything. I conclude that the passage, when it is examined, so far from overthrowing the uniformity of the testimony, is itself an instance of it, the institutor being in this case also one who had received.¹⁰ NB-56-001

There remains the testimony of the Egyptian priesthood itself, as it is delivered by Iamblichus in the person of an Egyptian priest, whose words, in Mr. Taylor's version, are that Hermes, the god who presides over language, "was formerly very properly considered as common to all priests," and that their ancestors "dedicated the inventions of their wisdom to this deity, inscribing all their own writings with the name of Hermes."¹¹ It may be objected that the word inventions is here applied by the priest to the learning of his own order, and that I am therefore obliged, upon my own principle, either to reject his testimony or to admit that the Egyptians themselves represented their learning as contrived. But the inventions of which the priest speaks are inventions of wisdom, that is, writings; they are not said to be inventions of the rite; and what is affirmed of them is not that they were framed for a purpose, but that they were referred, all of them, to one patron, and inscribed with one name, as the common possession of the whole order. A body which ascribes to a god whatever it has itself produced, and which holds its learning in common under his name, is the reverse of a legislator who contrives a worship in the name of the gods for the uses of the state: the one disowns its inventions, the other conceals his. I do not affirm that the priest is a sufficient witness to the antiquity of what he describes; I affirm only that, so far as he is a witness, he is a witness for the keeping of a deposit, and not for the contrivance of a policy.¹² NB-58-008 NB-47-006

The result of the examination may be stated in a few words. In the relations of Herodotus the rites are brought and taught; in that of Diodorus they are brought, and their names exchanged; in that of Clement, when it is examined, the author is one who had himself learned; in that of the Egyptian priest the learning of his order is held in common under the name of a god. In none of them is there any trace of the legislator, or of the purpose which the learned prelate assigns to him; and since the first assertion is not made good by the testimony of the ancients, it must rest, if it rest anywhere, upon the nature of the case. What the nature of the case requires, the learned prelate has himself, in another place, determined; and to the application of his principle I now proceed.¹³ NB-43-012 NB-45-004 NB-56-001 NB-58-008 NB-44-039 NB-57-003