naturally occurring to all to make the same distinction. The Egyptians
did so, in selecting those animals in which they recognized these
emblematic qualities, in order to symbolize the double sex of the
Universe. Their God KNEPH, out of whose mouth issued the Orphic egg,
whence the author of the Clementine Recognitions makes a hermaphroditic
figure to emerge, uniting in itself the two principles whereof Heaven
and the earth are forms, and which enter into the organization of all
beings which the heavens and the earth engender by their concourse,
furnishes another emblem of the double power, active and passive, which
the ancients saw in the Universe, and which they symbolized by the egg.
Orpheus, who studied in Egypt, borrowed from the theologians of that
country the mysterious forms under which the science of nature was
veiled, and carried into Greece the symbolic egg, with its division
into two parts or causes figured by the hermaphroditic being that issued
from it, and whereof Heaven and earth are composed.
The Brahmins of India expressed the same cosmogonic idea by a statue,
representative of the Universe, uniting in itself both sexes. The male
sex offered an image of the sun, centre of the active principle, and the
female sex that of the moon, at the sphere whereof, proceeding downward,
the passive portion of nature begins. The Lingam, unto the present day
revered in the Indian temples, being but the conjunction of the organs
of generation of the two sexes, was an emblem of the same. The Hindūs
have ever had the greatest veneration for this symbol of
ever-reproductive nature. The Greeks consecrated the same symbols of
universal fruitfulness in their Mysteries; and they were exhibited in
the sanctuaries of Eleusis. They appear among the sculptured ornaments
of all the Indian temples. Tertullian accuses the Valentinians of having
adopted the custom of venerating them; a custom, he says, introduced by
Melampus from Egypt into Greece. The Egyptians consecrated the Phallus
in the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis, as we learn from Plutarch and
Diodorus Siculus; and the latter assures us that these emblems were not
consecrated by the Egyptians alone, but by every people. They certainly
were so among the Persians and Assyrians; and they were regarded
everywhere as symbolic of the generative and productive powers of all
animated beings. In those early ages, the works of Nature and all her
agents were sacred like herself.
For the union of Nature with herself is a chaste marriage, of which the
union of man and woman was a natural image, and their organs were an
expressive emblem of the double energy which manifests itself in Heaven,
and Earth uniting together to produce all beings. "The Heavens," says
Plutarch, "seemed to men to fulfill the functions of father, and the
Earth of mother. The former impregnated the earth with its fertilizing
rains, and the earth, receiving them, became fruitful and brought
forth." Heaven, which covers and embraces the earth everywhere, is her
potent spouse, uniting himself to her to make her fruitful, without
which she would languish in everlasting sterility, buried in the shades
of chaos and of night. Their union is their marriage; their productions
or parts are their children. The skies are our Father, and Nature the
great Mother of us all.
This idea was not the dogma of a single sect, but the general opinion of
all the Sages. "Nature was divided," says Cicero, "into two parts, one
active, and the other that submitted itself to this action, which it
received, and which modified it. The former was deemed to be a Force,
and the latter the material on which that Force exerted itself."
Macrobius repeated almost literally the doctrine of Ocellus. Aristotle
termed the earth the fruitful mother, environed on all sides by the air.
Above it was Heaven, the dwelling-place of the gods and the divine
stars, its substance ether, or a fire incessantly moving in circles,
divine and incorruptible, and subject to no change. Below it, nature,
and the elements, mutable and acted on, corruptible and mortal.
Synesius said that generations were effected in the portions of the
Universe which we inhabit; while the cause of generations resided in the
portions above us, whence descend to us the germs of the effects
produced here below. Proclus and Simplicius deemed Heaven the Active
Cause and Father, relatively to the earth. The former says that the
World or the Whole is a single Animal; what is done _in_ it, is done
_by_ it; the same World _acts_, and _acts upon itself_. He divides it
into "Heaven" and "Generation." In the former, he says, are placed and
arranged the conservative causes of generation, superintended by the
Genii and Gods. The Earth, or Rhea, associated ever with Saturn in
production, is mother of the effects of which Heaven is Father; the womb
or bosom that receives the fertilizing energy of the God that engenders
ages. The great work of generation is operated, he says, primarily by
the action of the Sun, and secondarily by that of the Moon, so that the
Sun is the primitive source of this energy, as father and chief of the
male gods that form his court. He follows the action of the male and
female principles through all the portions and divisions of nature,
attributing to the former the origin of stability and identity, to the
latter, that of diversity and mobility. Heaven is to the earth, he says,
as the male to the female. It is the movement of the heavens that, by
their revolutions, furnished the seminal incitements and forces, whose
emanations received by the earth, make it fruitful, and cause it to
produce animals and plants of every kind.
Philo says that Moses recognized this doctrine of two causes, active and
passive; but made the former to reside in the Mind or Intelligence
external to matter.
The ancient astrologers divided the twelve signs of the Zodiac into six
male and six female, and assigned them to six male and six female Great
Gods. Heaven and Earth, or Ouranos and Ghê, were among most ancient
nations, the first and most ancient Divinities. We find them in the
Phœenician history of Sanchoniathon, and in the Grecian Genealogy of the
Gods given by Hesiod. Everywhere they marry, and by their union produce
the later Gods. "In the beginning," says Apollodorus, "Ouranos or the
Heavens was Lord of all the Universe: he took to wife Ghê or the earth,
and had by her many children." They were the first Gods of the Cretans,
and under other names, of the Armenians, as we learn from Berosus, and
of Panchaia, an island South of Arabia, as we learn from Euhemerus.
Orpheus made the Divinity, or the "Great Whole," male and female,
because, he said, it could produce nothing, unless it united in itself
the productive force of both sexes. He called Heaven PANGENETOR, the
Father of all things, most ancient of Beings, beginning and end of all,
containing in Himself the incorruptible and unwearying force of
Necessity.
The same idea obtained in the rude North of Europe. The Scythians made
the earth to be the wife of Jupiter; and the Germans adored her under
the name of HERTA. The Celts worshipped the Heavens and the Earth, and
said that without the former the latter would be sterile, and that their
marriage produced all things. The Scandinavians acknowledged BÖR or the
Heavens, and gave FURTUR, his son, the Earth as his wife. Olaus Rudbeck
adds, that their ancestors were persuaded that Heaven intermarried with
the Earth, and thus uniting his forces with hers, produced animals and
plants. This marriage of Heaven and Earth produced the AZES, Genii
famous in the theology of the North. In the theology of the Phrygians
and Lydians, the ASII were born of the marriage of the Supreme God with
the Earth, and Firmicus informs us that the Phrygians attributed to the
Earth supremacy over the other elements, and considered her the Great
Mother of all things.
Virgil sings the impregnation of the joyous earth, by the Ether, its
spouse, that descends upon its bosom, fertilizing it with rains.
Columella sings the loves of Nature and her marriage with Heaven
annually consummated at the sweet Spring-time. He describes the Spirit
of Life, the soul that animates the world, fired with the passion of
Love, uniting with Nature and itself, itself a part of Nature, and
filling its own bosom with new productions. This union of the Universe
with itself, this mutual action of two sexes, he terms "the great
Secrets of Nature," "the Mysteries of the Union of Heaven with Earth,
imaged in the Sacred Mysteries of Atys and Bacchus."
Varro tells us that the great Divinities adored at Samothrace were the
Heavens and the Earth, considered as First Causes or Primal Gods, and as
male and female agents, one bearing to the other the relations that the
Soul and Principle of Movement bear to the body or the matter that
receives them. These were the gods revered in the Mysteries of that
Island, as they were in the orgies of Phœnicia.
Everywhere the sacred body of Nature was covered with the veil of
allegory, which concealed it from the profane, and allowed it to be seen
only by the sage who thought it worthy to be the object of his study and
investigation. She showed herself to those only who loved her in spirit
and in truth, and she abandoned the indifferent and careless to error
and to ignorance. "The Sages of Greece," says Pausanias, "never wrote
otherwise than in an enigmatical manner, never naturally and directly."
"Nature," says Sallust the Philosopher, "should be sung only in a
language that imitates the secrecy of her processes and operations. She
is herself an enigma. We see only bodies in movement; the forces and
springs that move them are hidden from us." The poets inspired by the
Divinity, the wisest philosophers, all the theologians, the chiefs of
the initiations and Mysteries, even the gods uttering their oracles,
have borrowed the figurative language of allegory. "The Egyptians," says
Proclus, "preferred that mode of teaching, and spoke of the great
secrets of Nature, only in mythological enigmas." The Gymnosophists of
India and the Druids of Gaul lent to science the same enigmatic
language, and in the same style wrote the Hierophants of Phœnicia.
The division of things into the active and the passive cause leads to
that of the two Principles of Light and Darkness, connected with and
corresponding with it. For Light comes from the ethereal substance that
composes the active cause, and darkness from earth or the gross matter
which composes the passive cause. In Hesiod, the Earth, by its union
with Tartarus, engenders Typhon, Chief of the Powers or Genii of
Darkness. But it unites itself with the Ether or Ouranos, when it
engenders the Gods of Olympus, or the Stars, children of Starry Ouranos.
Light was the first Divinity worshipped by men. To it they owed the
brilliant spectacle of Nature. It seems an emanation from the Creator of
all things, making known to our senses the Universe which darkness hides
from our eyes, and, as it were, giving it existence. Darkness, as it
were, reduces all nature again to nothingness, and almost entirely
annihilates man.
Naturally, therefore, two substances of opposite natures were imagined,
to each of which the world was in turn subjected, one contributing to
its felicity and the other to its misfortune. Light multiplied its
enjoyments; Darkness despoiled it of them: the former was its friend,
the latter its enemy. To one all good was attributed; to the other all
evil; and thus the words "Light" and "Good" became synonymous, and the
words "Darkness" and "Evil." It seeming that Good and Evil could not
flow from one and the same source, any more than could Light and
Darkness, men naturally imagined two Causes or Principles, of different
natures and opposite in their effects, one of which shed Light and Good,
and the other Darkness and Evil, on the Universe.
This distinction of the two Principles was admitted in all the
Theologies, and formed one of the principal bases of all religions. It
entered as a primary element into the sacred fables, the cosmogonies and
the Mysteries of antiquity. "We are not to suppose," says Plutarch,
"that the Principles of the Universe are inanimate bodies, as Democritus
and Epicurus thought; nor that a matter devoid of qualities is organized
and arranged by a single Reason or Providence, Sovereign over all
things, as the Stoics held; for it is not possible that a single Being,
good or evil, is the cause of all, inasmuch as God can in nowise be the
cause of any evil. The harmony of the Universe is a combination of
contraries, like the strings of a lyre, or that of a bow, which
alternately is stretched and relaxed." "The good," says Euripides, "is
never separated from the Evil. The two must mingle, that all may go
well." And this opinion as to the two principles, continues Plutarch,
"is that of all antiquity. From the Theologians and Legislators it
passed to the Poets and Philosophers. Its author is unknown; but the
opinion itself is established by the traditions of the whole human race,
and consecrated in the mysteries and sacrifices both of the Greeks and
Barbarians, wherein was recognized the dogma of opposing principles in
nature, which, by their contrariety, produce the mixture of good and
evil. We must admit two contrary causes, two opposing powers, which
lead, one to the right and the other to the left, and thus control our
life, as they do the sublunary world, which is therefore subject to so
many changes and irregularities of every kind. For if there can be no
effect without a cause, and if the Good cannot be the cause of the Evil,
it is absolutely necessary that there should be a cause for the Evil, as
there is one for the Good." This doctrine, he adds, has been generally
received among most nations, and especially by those who have had the
greatest reputation for wisdom. All have admitted two gods, with
different occupations, one making the good and the other the evil found
in nature. The former has been styled "God," the latter "Demon." The
Persians, or Zoroaster, named the former Ormuzd and the latter Ahriman;
of whom they said one was of the nature of Light, the other of that of
Darkness. The Egyptians called the former Osiris, and the latter Typhon,
his eternal enemy.
The Hebrews, at least after their return from the Persian captivity, had
their good Deity, and the Devil, a bad and malicious Spirit, ever
opposing God, and Chief of the Angels of Darkness, as God was of those
of Light. The word "Satan" means, in Hebrew, simply, "The Adversary."
The Chaldeans, Plutarch says, had their good and evil stars. The Greeks
had their Jupiter and Pluto, and their Giants and Titans, to whom were
assigned the attributes of the Serpent with which Pluto or Serapis was
encircled, and the shape whereof was assumed by Typhon, Ahriman, and the
Satan of the Hebrews. Every people had something equivalent to this.
The People of Pegu believe in two Principles, one author of Good and the
other of Evil, and strive to propitiate the latter, while they think it
needless to worship the former, as he is incapable of doing evil. The
people of Java, of the Moluccas, of the Gold Coast, the Hottentots, the
people of Teneriffe and Madagascar, and the Savage Tribes of America,
all worship and strive to avert the anger and propitiate the good-will
of the Evil Spirit.
But among the Greeks, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, and Assyrians, the
doctrine of the two Principles formed a complete and regularly arranged
theological system. It was the basis of the religion of the Magi and of
Egypt. The author of an ancient work, attributed to Origen, says that
Pythagoras learned from Zarastha, a Magus at Babylon (the same, perhaps,
as Zerdusht or Zoroaster), that there are two principles of all things,
whereof one is the _father_ and the other the _mother_; the former,
Light, and the latter, Darkness. Pythagoras thought that the
Dependencies on Light were warmth, dryness, lightness, swiftness; and
those of Darkness, cold, wet, weight, and slowness; and that the world
derived its existence from these two principles, as from the male and
the female. According to Porphyry, he conceived two opposing powers, one
good, which he termed Unity, the Light, Right, the Equal, the Stable,
the Straight; the other evil, which he termed Binary, Darkness, the
Left, the Unequal, the Unstable, the Crooked. These ideas he received
from the Orientals, for he dwelt twelve years at Babylon, studying with
the Magi. Varro says he recognized two Principles of all things,--the
Finite and the Infinite, Good and Evil, Life and Death, Day and Night.
White he thought was of the nature of the Good Principle, and Black of
that of the Evil; that Light and Darkness, Heat and Cold, the Dry and
the Wet, mingled in equal proportions; that Summer was the triumph of
heat, and Winter of cold; that their equal combination produced Spring
and Autumn, the former producing verdure and favorable to health, and
the latter, deteriorating everything, giving birth to maladies. He
applied the same idea to the rising and setting of the sun; and, like
the Magi, held that God or Ormuzd in the body resembled light, and in
the soul, truth.
Aristotle, like Plato, admitted a principle of Evil, resident in matter
and in its eternal imperfection.
The Persians said that Ormuzd, born of the pure Light, and Ahriman, born
of darkness, were ever at war. Ormuzd produced six Gods, Beneficence,
Truth, Good Order, Wisdom, Riches, and Virtuous Joy. These were so many
emanations from the Good Principle, so many blessings bestowed by it on
men. Ahriman, in his turn, produced six Devs, opponents of the six
emanations from Ormuzd. Then Ormuzd made himself three times as great as
before, ascended as far above the sun as the sun is above the earth, and
adorned the heavens with stars, of which he made Sirius the sentinel or
advance-guard: that he then created twenty-four other Deities, and
placed them in an egg, where Ahriman also placed twenty-four others,
created by him, who broke the egg; and so intermingled Good and Evil.
Theopompus adds that, according to the Magi, for two terms of three
thousand years, each of the two Principles is to be by turns victor and
the other vanquished; then for three thousand more for each they are to
contend with each other, each destroying reciprocally the works of the
other; after which Ahriman is to perish, and men, wearing transparent
bodies, to enjoy unutterable happiness.
The twelve great Deities of the Persians, the six Amshaspands and six
Devs, marshalled, the former under the banner of Light, and the latter
under that of Darkness, are the twelve Zodiacal Signs or Months; the six
supreme signs, or those of Light, or of Spring and Summer, commencing
with Aries, and the six inferior, of Darkness, or of Autumn and Winter,
commencing with Libra. Limited Time, as contradistinguished from Time
without limits, or Eternity, is Time created and measured by the
celestial revolutions. It is comprehended in a period divided into
twelve parts, each subdivided into a thousand parts, which the Persians
termed years. Thus the circle annually traversed by the Sun was divided
into 12,000 parts, or each sign into 3,000: and thus, each year, the
Principle of Light and Good triumphed for 3,000 years, that of Evil and
Darkness for 3,000, and they mutually destroyed each other's labors for
6,000, or 3,000 for each: so that the Zodiac was equally divided between
them. And accordingly Ocellus Lucanus, the Disciple of Pythagoras, held
that the principal cause of all sublunary effects resided in the Zodiac,
and that from it flowed the good or bad influences of the planets that
revolved therein.
The twenty-four good and twenty-four evil Deities, enclosed in the Egg,
are the forty-eight constellations of the ancient sphere, equally
divided between the realms of Light and Darkness, on the concavity of
the celestial sphere which was apportioned among them; and which,
enclosing the world and planets, was the mystic and sacred egg of the
Magi, the Indians, and the Egyptians,--the egg that issued from the
mouth of the God Kneph, that figured as the Orphic Egg in the Mysteries
of Greece, that issued from the God Chumong of the Coresians, and from
the Egyptian Osiris and the God Phanes of the Modern Orphics, Principle
of Light,--the egg crushed by the Sacred Bull of the Japanese, and from
which the world emerged; that placed by the Greeks at the feet of
Bacchus the bull-horned God, and from which Aristophanes makes Love
emerge, who with Night organizes Chaos.
Thus the Balance, the Scorpion, the Serpent of Ophiucus, and the Dragon
of the Hesperides became malevolent Signs and Evil Genii; and entire
nature was divided between the two principles, and between the agents or
partial causes subordinate to them. Hence Michael and his Archangels,
and Satan and his fallen compeers. Hence the wars of Jupiter and the
Giants, in which the Gods of Olympus fought on the side of the
Light-God, against the dark progeny of earth and Chaos; a war which
Proclus regarded as symbolizing the resistance opposed by dark and
chaotic matter to the active and beneficent force which gives it
organization; an idea which in part appears in the old theory of two
Principles, one innate in the active and luminous substance of Heaven,
and the other in the inert and dark substance of matter that resists the
order and the good that Heaven communicates to it.
Osiris conquers Typhon, and Ormuzd, Ahriman, when, at the Vernal
Equinox, the creative action of Heaven and its demiourgic energy is most
strongly manifested. Then the principle of Light and Good overcomes that
of Darkness and Evil, and the world rejoices, redeemed from cold and
wintry darkness by the beneficent Sign into which the Sun then enters
triumphant and rejoicing, after his resurrection.
From the doctrine of the two Principles, Active and Passive, grew that
of the Universe, animated by a Principle of Eternal Life, and by a
Universal Soul, from which every isolated and temporary being received
at its birth an emanation, which, at the death of such being, returned
to its source. The life of matter as much belonged to nature as did
matter itself; and as life is manifested by movement, the sources of
life must needs seem to be placed in those luminous and eternal bodies,
and above all in the Heaven in which they revolve, and which whirls them
along with itself in that rapid course that is swifter than all other
movement. And fire and heat have so great an analogy with life, that
cold, like absence of movement, seemed the distinctive characteristic of
death. Accordingly, the vital fire that blazes in the Sun and produces
the heat that vivifies everything, was regarded as the principle of
organization and life of all sublunary beings.
According to this doctrine, the Universe is not to be regarded, in its
creative and eternal action, merely as an immense machine, moved by
powerful springs and forced into a continual movement, which, emanating
from the circumference, extends to the centre, acts and re-acts in
every possible direction, and re-produces in succession all the varied
forms which matter receives. So to regard it would be to recognize a
cold and purely mechanical action, the energy of which could never
produce life.
On the contrary, it was thought, the Universe should be deemed an
immense Being, always living, always moved and always moving in an
eternal activity inherent in itself, and which, subordinate to no
foreign cause, is communicated to all its parts, connects them together,
and makes of the world of things a complete and perfect whole. The order
and harmony which reign therein seem to belong to and be a part of it,
and the design of the various plans of construction of organized beings
would seem to be graven in its Supreme Intelligence, source of all the
other Intelligences which it communicates together with life to man.
Nothing existing out of it, it must be regarded as the principle and
term of all things.
Chæremon had no reason for saying that the Ancient Egyptians, inventors
of the sacred fables, and adorers of the Sun and the other luminaries,
saw in the Universe only a machine, without life and without
intelligence, either in its whole or in its parts; and that their
cosmogony was a pure Epicureanism, which required only matter and
movement to organize its world and govern it. Such an opinion would
necessarily exclude all religious worship. Wherever we suppose a
worship, there we must suppose intelligent Deities who receive it, and
are sensible to the homage of their adorers; and no other people were so
religious as the Egyptians.