SECTION III. OF THE SECRET: THAT THE THING CONCEALED WAS BEFORE THE CONCEALMENT.

The principle which the learned prelate has established respecting the hieroglyphics, and which I have proposed to extend to the rites, admits of being tested in the case of the Egyptians themselves; for we possess, in the writers of antiquity, some account of the manner in which the Egyptian priesthood concealed what it possessed, and from the manner of the concealment it is not impossible to determine, at least with such probability as the subject permits, whether the thing concealed was framed in order to be concealed, or was first possessed and afterwards hidden. The witnesses upon this head are three, Plutarch, Origen and Clement of Alexandria, to whom I shall add, for a reason which will appear, an interpreter of the sacred symbols and a writer of fable; and I shall consider them, not in the order of their age, but in that of the light which each throws upon the question.¹ NB-57-003 NB-44-014 NB-46-009 NB-57-007

Plutarch, in his treatise concerning Isis and Osiris, relates that among the Egyptians he who was chosen out of the soldiery was obliged at once to become a priest, and was thereupon admitted to a participation of their philosophy; and he describes that philosophy as one whose character it was to conceal the greater part of what it held under fables and relations containing obscure intimations and resemblances of the truth, as the priests themselves signified, he says, by setting sphinxes before their temples.² It is impossible to read this account without perceiving that the philosophy is represented as existing before the person who is admitted to it; that the concealment is described as its character, that is, as the manner in which it was held, and not as the purpose for which it was framed; and that the person who is chosen, so far from being the author of the secret, is its recipient, being admitted to it upon his election, and obliged to become a priest in order to receive it. NB-44-014

To the same treatise we owe the inscription which, as Plutarch relates, stood upon the temple of Minerva at Sais, whom the Egyptians held to be the same with Isis, and in which the goddess declares that she is whatever was, or is, or will be, and that no mortal has lifted her veil.³ I am willing to allow, and indeed I think it evident, that a declaration of this kind accords with the opinion of the learned prelate respecting the secret, so far as it is the declaration of one being who comprehends whatever is; and in this respect I have no wish to diminish the force of the second assertion. But I would observe that the inscription is set up upon a temple, where it might be read by all, and that what it declares to be concealed is not the doctrine but the deity: so that here, as in the account of the soldier, the thing possessed is openly professed, and the concealment is spoken of as belonging to the nature of that which is concealed, and not to the policy of those who concealed it. NB-44-014 NB-58-008

Origen, in replying to Celsus, distinguishes among the Egyptians two classes of persons: the learned, who are much given to philosophising concerning the things which among them are accounted divine; and the vulgar, who, hearing certain fables of which they do not understand the reasons, are much elated with their supposed knowledge; and he likens one who judges in such a manner to a person who, having visited Egypt and been a disciple of the ignorant alone, and having had no converse with the priests, should imagine himself acquainted with the whole compass of the Egyptian learning.⁴ Here again the division is not between the magistrate who contrives and the people who are deceived, but between those within the same religion who possess its reasons and those who possess only its relations; and the relation, which the vulgar hear without understanding it, is evidently supposed by the writer to have a reason, which the learned understand without having invented it. NB-46-009

But the most exact account which antiquity has left us of the Egyptian manner of concealment is that of Clement, who in the fifth book of the Stromata distinguishes three kinds of Egyptian writing: the first, called the epistolographic; the second, the hieratic, which the sacred scribes practise; and the third and last, the hieroglyphic, of which one kind expresses things literally by the first elements, and the other symbolically; and of the symbolic, he adds, one kind speaks properly by imitation, another writes as it were by figures, and a third is altogether allegorical, and makes use of certain enigmas.⁵ Now it will be observed that of all these kinds, only the last subdivision of the last kind is said to conceal anything; that the writing which conceals is thus the most remote of all from the writing which records; and that the order in which Clement enumerates the kinds, and in which, as he says, the instructed among the Egyptians learned them, is the order of the learned prelate's own account of the hieroglyphics, in which the plain use is first and the mysterious use is last. If, therefore, the order of the writing be any indication of the order of the thing written, the enigma is the latest form of a doctrine which had first been expressed without one. NB-57-007 NB-57-012

The same writer, in another chapter, adduces instances of the enigmatical kind, and compares it with the enigmas of the Hebrews: the Egyptians, he says, represent the sun sometimes upon a ship and sometimes upon a crocodile; and upon the temple at Diospolis there were figured a boy, as the symbol of production, an old man, as that of decay, a hawk, which signified God, a fish, which signified hatred, and a crocodile, which signified impudence, the whole being intended to teach, when it was read together, that God hates impudence in those who are born and die.⁶ I do not insist upon the moral, which is not of the most recondite kind; I insist only upon the circumstance that the figures, when they are read together, form a sentence, and that a sentence is written in order to be read. The concealment, therefore, if it be a concealment at all, is a concealment of the manner and not of the matter; and the matter which it conceals is one which could have been declared in plain words, and had probably been so declared before it was figured. The interpreter of the sacred symbols, whose work is extant under the name of Horapollo, gives the reasons for which the hawk was employed to signify God: that the bird is prolific and long-lived, or rather that it seems to be an image of the sun, being able to look more steadily towards his rays than any other winged creature;⁷ but these reasons are evidently those of the interpreter and not of the inventor, and are such as might be assigned to any symbol long after its signification had been fixed by use. I observe, also, that the symbol does not fall under the first of the three ways in which the learned prelate supposes the picture to have been abridged, namely, to make the principal circumstance of a subject stand for the whole; for the hawk is not a circumstance of God, and the reason of the figure, whatever it was, is not to be had from the figure itself.⁸ NB-57-012 NB-58-003

To these witnesses I have proposed to add a writer of fable, and I do so with the caution which his character requires. Apuleius, in the eleventh book of his Metamorphoses, makes his narrator relate that there were brought out of the secret place of the temple books "partly written with unknown characters, and partly painted with figures of beasts," which, as he adds, "were strange and impossible to be read of the prophane people."⁹ The relation is that of a narrator concerning himself, in a fable of the author's own composition, and is therefore to be received as fable before it is received as testimony; and if it be received as testimony, it is a testimony to a concealing, and to nothing more. But it is consistent with what the learned prelate has himself allowed, namely, that the Egyptians did at length employ their figures for concealment; and it says nothing of the length of time during which the books had been so kept, or of the purpose for which they had first been written.¹⁰ NB-58-014

I conclude, therefore, upon the testimony of these writers, that the secret of the Egyptian Mysteries was a doctrine first possessed and afterwards concealed; that the concealment belongs, as the learned prelate has shown in the case of the writing, to a later age than the thing concealed; and that the second assertion, which makes the unity of the Godhead the secret of the rites, may be allowed so far as it describes a part of what was kept, but must be denied so far as it represents that part as the discovery of philosophers or the device of the state. What else the deposit contained, and whence it was itself derived, are questions which do not belong to the present tractate, and which I reserve to the larger work for which these pages are in some sort a preparation.¹¹ NB-44-039 NB-58-008 NB-57-003