AMUN-RE, and worshipped at Memphis in Lower Egypt, and in Libya, as well
as in Upper Egypt. He was the Libyan Jupiter, and represented the
intelligent and organizing force that develops itself in Nature, when
the intellectual types or forms of bodies are revealed to the senses in
the world's order, by their union with matter, whereby the generation
of bodies is effected. He was the same with Kneph, from whose mouth
issued the Orphic egg out of which came the Universe.
DIONUSOS was the Nature-God of the Greeks, as AMUN was of the Egyptians.
In the popular legend, Dionusos, as well as Hercules, was a Theban Hero,
born of a mortal mother. Both were sons of Zeus, both persecuted by
Heré. But in Hercules the God is subordinate to the Hero; while
Dionusos, even in poetry, retains his divine character, and is identical
with Iacchus, the presiding genius of the Mysteries. Personification of
the Sun in Taurus, as his ox-hoofs showed, he delivered earth from the
harsh dominion of Winter, conducted the mighty chorus of the Stars, and
the celestial revolution of the year, changed with the seasons, and
underwent their periodical decay. He was the Sun as invoked by the
Eleans, [Greek: Πυριγενης], ushered into the world amidst lightning and
thunder, the Mighty Hunter of the Zodiac, Zagreus the Golden or
ruddy-faced. The Mysteries taught the doctrine of Divine Unity; and that
Power whose Oneness is a seeming mystery, but really a truism, was
Dionusos, the God of Nature, or of that, moisture, which is the life of
Nature, who prepares in darkness, in Hades or Iasion, the return of life
and vegetation, or is himself the light and change evolving their
varieties. In the Egean Islands he was Butes, Dardanus, Himeros or
Imbros; in Crete he appears as Iasius or even Zeus, whose orgiastic
worship, remaining unveiled by the usual forms of mystery, betrayed to
profane curiosity the symbols which, if irreverently contemplated, were
sure to be misunderstood.
He was the same with the dismembered Zagreus, the son of Persephone, an
Ancient Subterranean Dionusos, the horned progeny of Zeus in the
Constellation of the Serpent, entrusted by his father with the
thunderbolt, and encircled with the protecting dance of Curetes. Through
the envious artifices of Heré, the Titans eluded the vigilance of his
guardians and tore him to pieces; but Pallas restored the still
palpitating heart to his father, who commanded Apollo to bury the
dismembered remains upon Parnassus.
Dionusos, as well as Apollo, was leader of the Muses; the tomb of one
accompanied the worship of the other; they were the same, yet different,
contrasted, yet only as filling separate parts in the same drama; and
the mystic and heroic personifications, the God of Nature and of Art,
seem, at some remote period, to have proceeded from a common source.
Their separation was one of form rather than of substance: and from the
time when Hercules obtained initiation from Triptolemus, or Pythagoras
received Orphic tenets, the two conceptions were tending to re-combine.
It was said that Dionusos or Poseidon had preceded Apollo in the
Oracular office; and Dionusos continued to be esteemed in Greek Theology
as Healer and Saviour, Author of Life and Immortality. The dispersed
Pythagoreans, "Sons of Apollo," immediately betook themselves to the
Orphic Service of Dionusos, and there are indications that there was
always something Dionysiac in the worship of Apollo.
Dionusos is the Sun, that liberator of the elements; and his spiritual
meditation was suggested by the same imagery which made the Zodiac the
supposed path of the Spirits in their descent and their return. His
second birth, as offspring of the highest, is a type of the spiritual
regeneration of man. He, as well as Apollo, was precentor of the Muses
and source of inspiration. His rule prescribed no unnatural
mortification: its yoke was easy, and its mirthful choruses, combining
the gay with the severe, did but commemorate that golden age when earth
enjoyed eternal spring, and when fountains of honey, milk, and wine
burst forth out of its bosom at the touch of the thyrsus. He is the
"Liberator." Like Osiris, he frees the soul, and guides it in its
migrations beyond the grave, preserving it from the risk of again
falling under the slavery of matter or of some inferior animal form. All
soul is part of the Universal Soul, whose totality is Dionusos; and he
leads back the vagrant spirit to its home, and accompanies it through
the purifying processes, both real and symbolical, of its earthly
transit. He died and descended to the Shades; and his suffering was the
great secret of the Mysteries, as death is the grand mystery of
existence. He is the immortal suitor of Psyche (the Soul), the Divine
influence which physically called the world into being, and which,
awakening the soul from its Stygian trance, restores it from earth to
Heaven.
Of HERMES, the Mercury of the Greeks, the Thoth of the Egyptians, and
the Taaut of the Phœnicians, we have heretofore spoken sufficiently at
length. He was the inventor of letters and of Oratory, the winged
messenger of the Gods, bearing the Caduceus wreathed with serpents; and
in our Council he is represented by the ORATOR.
The _Hindūs_ called the Sun SURYA; the _Persians_, MITHRAS; the
_Egyptians_, OSIRIS; the _Assyrians_ and _Chaldæans_, BEL; the
_Scythians_ and _Etruscans_ and the ancient _Pelasgi_, ARKALEUS or
HERCULES; the _Phœnicians_, ADONAI or ADON; and the _Scandinavians_,
ODIN.
From the name SURYA, given by the Hindūs to the Sun, the Sect who paid
him particular adoration were called _Souras_. Their painters describe
his car as drawn by seven green horses. In the Temple of Visweswara, at
Benares, there is an ancient piece of sculpture, well executed in stone,
representing him sitting in a car drawn by a horse with twelve heads.
His charioteer, by whom he is preceded, is ARUN [from [Hebrew: אןך], AUR
the _Crepusculum?_], or the Dawn; and among his many titles are twelve
that denote his distinct powers in each of the twelve months. Those
powers are called Adityas, each of whom has a particular name. Surya is
supposed frequently to have descended upon earth, in a human shape, and
to have left a race on earth, equally renowned in Indian story with the
Heliades of Greece. He is often styled King of the Stars and Planets,
and thus reminds us of the Adon-Tsbauth (Lord of the Starry Hosts) of
the Hebrew writings.
MITHRAS was the Sun-God of the Persians; and was fabled to have been
born in a grotto or cave, at the Winter Solstice. His feasts were
celebrated at that period, at the moment when the sun commenced to
return Northward, and to increase the length of the days. This was the
great Feast of the Magian religion. The Roman Calendar, published in the
time of Constantine, at which period his worship began to gain ground in
the Occident, fixed his feast-day on the 25th of December. His statues
and images were inscribed, _Deo-Soli invicto Mithrœ_--to the invincible
Sun-God Mithras. _Nomen invictum Sol Mithra ... Soli Omnipotenti
Mithrœ_. To him, gold, incense, and myrrh were consecrated. "Thee," says
Martianus Capella, in his hymn to the Sun, "the dwellers on the Nile
adore as Serapis, and Memphis worships as Osiris; in the sacred rites of
Persia thou art Mithras, in Phrygia, Atys, and Libya bows down to thee
as Ammon, and Phœnician Byblos as Adonis; and thus the whole world
adores thee under different names."
OSIRIS was the son of Helios (Phra), the "divine offspring congenerate
with the dawn," and at the same time an incarnation of Kneph or
Agathodæmon, the Good Spirit, including all his possible manifestations,
either physical or moral. He represented in a familiar form the
beneficent aspect of all higher emanations and in him was developed the
conception of a Being purely good, so that it became necessary to set up
another power as his adversary called Seth, Babys or Typhon, to account
for the injurious influences of Nature.
With the phenomena of agriculture, supposed to be the invention of
Osiris, the Egyptians connected the highest truths of their religion.
The soul of man was as the seed hidden in the ground, and the mortal
framework, similarly consigned to its dark resting-place, awaited its
restoration to life's unfailing source. Osiris was not only benefactor
of the living; he was also Hades, Serapis, and Rhadamanthus, the monarch
of the dead. Death, therefore, in Egyptian opinion, was only another
name for _renovation_, since its God is the same power who incessantly
renews vitality in Nature. Every corpse duly embalmed was called
"Osiris," and in the grave was supposed to be united, or at least
brought into approximation, to the Divinity. For when God became
incarnate for man's benefit, it was implied that, in analogy with His
assumed character, He should submit to _all_ the conditions of visible
existence. In death, as in life, Isis and Osiris were patterns and
precursors of mankind; their sepulchres stood within the temples of the
Superior Gods; yet though their remains might be entombed at Memphis or
Abydus, their divinity was unimpeached, and they either shone as
luminaries in the heavens, or in the unseen world presided over the
futurity of the disembodied spirits whom death had brought nearer to
them.
The notion of a dying God, so frequent in Oriental legend, and of which
we have already said much in former Degrees, was the natural inference
from a literal interpretation of nature-worship; since nature, which in
the vicissitudes of the seasons seems to undergo a dissolution, was to
the earliest religionists the express image of the Deity, and at a
remote period one and the same with the "varied God," whose attributes
were seen not only in its vitality, but in its changes. The unseen Mover
of the Universe was rashly identified with its obvious fluctuations. The
speculative Deity suggested by the drama of nature, was worshipped with
imitative and sympathetic rites. A period of mourning about the Autumnal
Equinox, and of joy at the return of Spring, was almost universal.
Phrygians and Paphlagonians, Bœotians, and even Athenians, were all more
or less attached to such observances; the Syrian damsels sat weeping for
Thammuz or Adoni, mortally wounded by the tooth of Winter, symbolized
by the boar, its very general emblem: and these rites, and those of Atys
and Osiris, were evidently suggested by the arrest of vegetation, when
the Sun, descending from his altitude, seems deprived of his generating
power.
Osiris is a being analogous to the Syrian ADONI; and the fable of his
history, which we need not here repeat, is a narrative form of the
popular religion of Egypt, of which the Sun is the Hero, and the
agricultural calendar the moral. The moist valley of the Nile, owing its
fertility to the annual inundation, appeared, in contrast with the
surrounding desert, like life in the midst of death. The inundation was
in evident dependence on the Sun, and Egypt, environed with arid
deserts, like a heart within a burning censer, was the female power,
dependent on the influences personified in its God. Typhon his brother,
the type of darkness, drought, and sterility, threw his body into the
Nile; and thus Osiris, the "good," the "Saviour," perished, in the 28th
year of his life or reign, and on the 17th day of the month Athor, or
the 13th of November. He is also made to die during the heats of the
early Summer, when, from March to July, the earth was parched with
intolerable heat, vegetation was scorched, and the languid Nile
exhausted. From that death he rises when the Solstitial Sun brings the
inundation, and Egypt is filled with mirth and acclamation anticipatory
of the second harvest. From his Wintry death he rises with the early
flowers of Spring, and then the joyful festival of Osiris found was
celebrated.
So the pride of Jemsheed, one of the Persian Sun-heroes, or the solar
year personified, was abruptly cut off by Zohak, the tyrant of the West.
He was sawn asunder by a fish-bone, and immediately the brightness of
Iran changed to gloom. Ganymede and Adonis, like Osiris, were hurried
off in all their strength and beauty; the premature death of Linus, the
burthen of the ancient lament of Greece, was like that of the Persian
Siamek, the Bithynian Hylas, and the Egyptian Maneros, Son of Menes or
the Eternal. The elegy called Maneros was sung at Egyptian banquets, and
an effigy enclosed within a diminutive Sarcophagus was handed round to
remind the guests of their brief tenure of existence. The beautiful
Memnon, also, perished in his prime; and Enoch, whose early death was
lamented at Iconium, lived 365 years, the number of days of the solar
year; a brief space when compared with the longevity of his patriarchal
kindred.
The story of Osiris is reflected in those of Orpheus and Dionusos
Zagreus, and perhaps in the legends of Absyrtus and Pelias, of Æson,
Thyestes, Melicertes, Itys, and Pelops. Io is the disconsolate Isis or
Niobe: and Rhea mourns her dismembered Lord Hyperion, and the death of
her son Helios, drowned in the Eridanus; and if Apollo and Dionusos are
immortal, they had died under other names, as Orpheus, Linus, or
Hyacinthus. The sepulchre of Zeus was shown in Crete. Hippolytus was
associated in divine honors with Apollo, and after he had been torn to
pieces like Osiris, was restored to life by the Pæonian herbs of Diana,
and kept darkling in the secret grove of Egeria. Zeus deserted Olympus
to visit the Ethiopians; Apollo underwent servitude to Admetus; Theseus,
Peirithous, Hercules, and other heroes, descended for a time to Hades; a
dying Nature-God was exhibited in the Mysteries, the Attic women fasted,
sitting on the ground, during the Thesmophoria, and the Bœotians
lamented the descent of Cora-Proserpine to the Shades.
But the death of the Deity, as understood by the Orientals, was not
inconsistent with His immortality. The temporary decline of the Sons of
Light is but an episode in their endless continuity; and as the day and
year are more convenient subdivisions of the Infinite, so the fiery
deaths of Phaëthon or Hercules are but breaks in the same Phœnix process
of perpetual regeneration, by which the spirit of Osiris lives forever
in the succession of the Memphian Apis. Every year witnesses the revival
of Adonis; and the amber tears shed by the Heliades for the premature
death of their brother, are the golden shower full of prolific hope, in
which Zeus descends from the brazen vault of Heaven into the bosom of
the parched ground.
BAL, representative or personification of the sun, was one of the Great
Gods of Syria, Assyria, and Chaldea, and his name is found upon the
monuments of Nimroud, and frequently occurs in the Hebrew writings. He
was the Great Nature-God of Babylonia, the Power of heat, life, and
generation. His symbol was the Sun, and he was figured seated on a bull.
All the accessories of his great temple at Babylon, described by
Herodotus, are repeated with singular fidelity, but on a smaller scale,
in the Hebrew tabernacle and temple. The golden statue alone is wanted
to complete the resemblance. The word _Bal_ or _Baal_, like the word
_Adon_, signifies Lord and Master. He was also the Supreme Deity of the
Moabites, Amonites, and Carthaginians, and of the Sabeans in general;
the Gauls worshipped the Sun under the name of Belin or Belinus: and
Bela is found among the Celtic Deities upon the ancient monuments.
The Northern ancestors of the Greeks maintained with hardier habits a
more manly style of religious symbolism than the effeminate enthusiasts
of the South, and had embodied in their _Perseus_, HERCULES and MITHRAS,
the consummation of the qualities they esteemed and exercised.
Almost every nation will be found to have had a mythical being, whose
strength or weakness, virtues or defects, more or less nearly describe
the Sun's career through the seasons. There was a Celtic, a Teutonic, a
Scythian, an Etruscan, a Lydian Hercules, all whose legends became
tributary to those of the Greek hero. The name of Hercules was found by
Herodotus to have been long familiar in Egypt and the East, and to have
originally belonged to a much higher personage than the comparatively
modern hero known in Greece as the Son of Alcmena. The temple of the
Hercules of Tyre was reported to have been built 2300 years before the
time of Herodotus; and Hercules, whose Greek name has been sometimes
supposed to be of Phœnician origin, in the sense of Circuitor, _i.e._
"rover" and "perambulator" of earth, as well as "Hyperion" of the sky,
was the patron and model of those famous navigators who spread his
altars from coast to coast through the Mediterranean, to the extremities
of the West, where "ARKALEUS" built the City of Gades, and where a
perpetual fire burned in his service. He was the lineal descendant of
Perseus, the luminous child of darkness, conceived within a subterranean
vault of brass; and he a representation of the Persian Mithras, rearing
his emblematic lions above the gates of Mycenæ, and bringing the sword
of Jemsheed to battle against the Gorgons of the West. Mithras is
similarly described in the Zend-Avesta as the "mighty hero, the rapid
runner, whose piercing eye embraces all, whose arm bears the club for
the destruction of the Darood."
Hercules Ingeniculus, who, bending on one knee, uplifts his club and
tramples on the Serpent's head, was, like Prometheus and Tantalus, one
of the varying aspects of the struggling and declining Sun. The
victories of Hercules are but exhibitions of Solar power which have
ever to be repeated. It was in the far North, among the Hyperboreans,
that, divested of his Lion's skin he lay down to sleep, and for a time
lost the horses of his chariot. Henceforth that Northern region of
gloom, called the "place of the death and revival of Adonis," that
Caucasus whose summit was so lofty, that, like the Indian Meru, it
seemed to be both the goal and commencement of the Sun's career, became
to Greek imaginations the final bourne of all things, the abode of
Winter and desolation, the pinnacle of the arch connecting the upper and
lower world, and consequently the appropriate place for the banishment
of Prometheus. The daughters of Israel, weeping for Thammuz, mentioned
by Ezekiel, sat looking to the North, and waiting for his return from
that region. It was while Cybele with the Sun-God was absent among the
Hyperboreans, that Phrygia, abandoned by her, suffered the horrors of
famine. Delos and Delphi awaited the return of Apollo from the
Hyperboreans, and Hercules brought thence to Olympia the olive. To all
Masons, the North has immemorially been the place of darkness; and of
the great lights of the Lodge, none is in the North.
Mithras, the rock-born hero [Greek: Πετρογενης], heralded the Sun's
return in Spring, as Prometheus, chained in his cavern, betokened the
continuance of Winter. The Persian beacon on the mountain-top
represented the Rock-born Divinity enshrined in his worthiest temple;
and the funeral conflagration of Hercules was the sun dying in glory
behind the Western hills. But though the transitory manifestation
suffers or dies, the abiding and eternal power liberates and saves. It
was an essential attribute of a Titan, that he should arise again after
his fall; for the revival of Nature is as certain as its decline, and
its alternations are subject to the appointment of a power which
controls them both.
"God", says Maximus Tyrius, "did not spare His own Son [Hercules], or
exempt Him from the calamities incidental to humanity". The Theban
progeny of Jove had his share of pain and trial. By vanquishing earthly
difficulties he proved his affinity with Heaven. His life was a
continuous struggle. He fainted before Typhon in the desert; and in the
commencement of the Autumnal season (cum longæ redit hora noctis),
descended under the guidance of Minerva to Hades. He died; but first
applied for initiation to Eumolpus, in order to foreshadow that state of
religious preparation which should precede the momentous change. Even in
Hades he rescued Theseus and removed the stone of Ascalaphus,
reanimated the bloodless spirits, and dragged into the light of day the
monster Cerberus, justly reputed invincible because an emblem of Time
itself; he burst the chains of the grave (for Busiris is the grave
personified), and triumphant at the close as in the dawn of his career,
was received after his labors into the repose of the heavenly mansions,
living forever with Zeus in the arms of Eternal Youth.
ODIN is said to have borne twelve names among the old Germans, and to
have had 114 names besides. He was the Apollo of the Scandinavians, and
is represented in the Voluspa as destined to slay the monstrous snake.
Then the Sun will be extinguished, the earth be dissolved in the ocean,
the stars lose their brightness, and all Nature be destroyed, in order
that it may be renewed again. From the bosom of the waters a new world
will emerge clad in verdure; harvests will be seen to ripen where no
seed was sown, and evil will disappear.
The free fancy of the ancients, which wove the web of their myths and
legends, was consecrated by faith. It had not, like the modern mind, set
apart a petty sanctuary of borrowed beliefs, beyond which all the rest
was common and unclean. Imagination, reason, and religion circled round
the same symbol; and in all their symbols there was serious meaning, if
we could but find it out. They did not devise fictions in the same vapid
spirit in which we, cramped by conventionalities, read them. In
endeavoring to interpret creations of fancy, fancy as well as reason
must guide: and much of modern controversy arises out of heavy
misapprehensions of ancient symbolism.
To those ancient peoples, this earth was the centre of the Universe. To
them there were no other worlds, peopled with living beings, to divide
the care and attention of the Deity. To them the World was a great
plain, of unknown, perhaps inconceivable limits, and the Sun, the Moon,
and the Stars journeyed above it, to give them light. The worship of the
Sun became the basis of all the religions of antiquity. To them light
and heat were mysteries; as indeed they still are to us. As the Sun
caused the day, and his absence the night; as, when he journeyed
Northward, Spring and Summer followed him; and when he again turned to
the South, Autumn and inclement Winter, and cold and long dark nights
ruled the earth; ... as his influence produced the leaves and flowers,
and ripened the harvests, and brought regular inundation, he
necessarily became to them the most interesting object of the material
Universe. To them he was the innate fire of bodies, the fire of nature.
Author of Life, heat, and ignition, he was to them the efficient cause
of all generation, for without him there was no movement, no existence,
no form. He was to them immense, indivisible, imperishable, and
everywhere present. It was their need of light, and of his creative
energy, that was felt by all men; and nothing was more fearful to them
than his absence. His beneficent influences caused his identification
with the Principle of Good; and the BRAHMA of the Hindus, the MITHRAS of
the Persians, and ATHOM, AMUN, PHTHA, and OSIRIS, of the Egyptians, the
BEL of the Chaldeans, the ADONAI of the Phœnicians, the ADONIS and
APOLLO of the Greeks became but personifications of the Sun, the
regenerating Principle, image of that fecundity which perpetuates and
rejuvenates the world's existence.