CHAPTER XI.

THE SUPERNATURAL IN ANCIENT EGYPT.

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Multarum rerum naturas nostram superare scientiam et fallere.

AUGUSTINE, De Civitate Dei, lib. xxi. c. 4.

De nos jours, le passé glorieux de l'Égypte, de l'Assyrie, de la Grèce et de Rome n'est qu'une lettre morte pour les savants; les musées, remplis de chefs-d'œuvre, n'ont de l'attrait que pour les artistes, amateurs des belles formes; mais il y a là plus que de vaines formes; une réalité vivante se déroule devant nos yeux étonnés, lorsque nous voyons ces chefs-d'œuvre animés par le souffle puissant de l'esprit qui jadis a vivifié leurs modèles corporels.

LE BARON GULDENSTUBBE, Pneumatologie Positive, p. 50.

HAVE given so much explanation of the mythology of the Egyptians in my chapter on the original religion of the ancient nations, that we may here dismiss that part of the subject. We may regard Egypt, next to Chaldea, as the great school and mother of mythologic spiritualism. The Egyptian system was carried into Greece by Danaus, Cadmus, and Orpheus. Some make Orpheus a Thracian, others a Theban, but the greatest authorities make him an Egyptian. He would seem to have travelled over various regions ere he reached Greece. The story of his descending to Hades to recall his wife Eurydice is referred to the descent of Horus to the shades. Some say that he lived eleven ages before the siege of Troy. Bryant would convert him into a city in Pieria or Pæonia. Others think Orpheus was a general name for one of the Magi; others that Orpheus and Cadmus only represent Egyptian colonies settling in Greece, and bringing mysterious and oracular songs with them. These colonies,

REMARKABLE CHARACTER OF EGYPT.

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it is said, spread over various countries like a deluge. Amongst them went Canaanites and Caphtorim of Palestine. They settled in Colchis, Thrace, Phrygia, Sicily, Etruria. Istrus and Diodorus Siculus speak largely of them. These matters were so well known in Egypt, and the recent very civilisation of the Greeks derived from them, that Solon was mortified to hear the priests in Egypt say that the Greeks were but children, and had derived everything from them, as testified by the names of most of their gods, goddesses, men and women; as Cecrops, Ion, Ione, Codrus, Helen, and the like. The Pelasgi were Egyptians, and as Zonaras says, All these things came from Chaldea to Egypt, and from thence were derived to the Greeks.'

There is something remarkable in Egypt as connected It is described in the with the spiritual history of man. Bible as the land of darkness and of bondage, and yet as a land famous for its wisdom. The patriarchs, one after another, had to descend into Egypt and to be brought up out of it again. This was the successive case with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Joseph was sold into Egypt and yet had his bones carried up again into the Promised Land. The Israelites were carried as a nation into Egypt, and brought up again in triumph. Christ was carried down into Egypt in accordance with prophecy, which said, 'Out of Egypt have I called my Son.' He was brought up again thence to fulfill His great career, and to free the human race from spiritual bondage and darkness. The French, under Bonaparte, had to descend into Egypt and the English had to go down there in pursuit of them. We are all spiritually sent down into Egypt, into darkness, bondage of soul, gloomy doubt, and despair, till we are called up thence in the footsteps of Christ, the Redeemer, of whom Moses was the type. Yet it is the land of much abstruse wisdom; Moses was learned in it, and it was diffused by pen and the colonies all over the west through Greece, whose philosophy, based on Egypt, we are sedulously taught to this day. The day of redemption from Egypt has not yet come to our schools,

where it reigns triumphant over Christianity in classic studies.

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What wonder, then, that Egypt was the great mistress of arts and philosophies, patent and occult, in the ancient world! There is no doubt that the power of Egypt lay in the retention of an ampler portion than other nations of the same epoch of the original knowledge and power of human nature, of that primal period when man still held much of that spiritual clairvoyance and sympathy with the spirit-world which he possessed before the Fall. The ancient wisdom of the Egyptians,' says Dr. Ennemoser, is not a creation of history, a gradual developement, as in natural objects; for man is not a production of nature, he is an immediate creation and image of God, which resembles him and is perfect in soul and body. That ancient natural wisdom of early nations was but fragmentary, for the original perfection had been lost before recorded times. These sealed temples were illuminated by but a faint ray of that originally pure spirit, a small and confused consolation to fallen man; here a few blossoms of prophecy appeared occasionally on the barren stem.'

And Schubert says in like manner, An old tradition, a prophecy of the Völuspá, appears to announce that nature first became conscious through the living word, through the soul of man. The word, however, appears as a higher reve lation. We know that among the Persians a creative spirit and a power over nature and the being of things is ascribed to the living word. Language, like the prophecies of the poet and seer, was created by a higher inspiration. To the speaker of the living word the future and past were revealed, because the eternal spirit, in which the future as well as the past is contained, spake in him. In the early ages of the world, speech was an immediate result of inspiration; and certainly the theory that social wants had created it by degrees, from various simple sounds, could only be of modern date. This view of the early ages which derives language from inspiration, can only be appreciated through the most ancient natural philosophy. According to this, all beings

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EGYPT CARRIED TO GREECE. 277

exist in and by the high influence which is common to them all. This is the flame in light, the spirit in language, love in marriage. This belief in the one common spirit of all things is perceptible in the religious doctrines of the Persians, the Indians, and Egyptians. By these theories it was plain through what means man became acquainted with the secrets of nature, futurity and the past; by inspiration and prophecy. That higher, universally common spirit, in which the laws of the change of time, the cause of everything, future as well as present, becomes the connecting medium, through which the souls of those who are separated by time and space approach each other; and the mind, when, in the moments of inspiration, it is sunk into the depths of the spirit of nature, is placed in a spiritual communication with all things, and receives the power of influencing them. Those portions of knowledge which among us have only been drawn forth singly, after a long and tedious investigation, are but a small portion of that comprehensive knowledge which antiquity preserved.' This was the knowledge which lay at the bottom of the wisdom of Egypt,' and which was preserved with so much secrecy in the recesses of their temples. Whence came the

higher and more spiritual philosophy of Greece? that philosophy which in Plato has been matter of astonishment, and has been pronounced to approach to the sublime doctrines of Christianity? It was brought from Egypt by the successive sages of Greece, who went down into Egypt, like the patriarchs, to come up laden with the spoils of the EgyptiansOrpheus, Thales, who was said first to proclaim the immortality of the soul in Greece, Pythagoras, and Solon. It was in Egypt that the great lawgiver of Greece was taught that the Greeks were yet in philosophy but children. And so carefully was this primal knowledge guarded by the Egyptians that Pythagoras is said by Iamblichus to have spent twenty-two years before he could penetrate into the core of their mysteries. Not all the power of Amasis, the Egyptian King, could induce the priests to reveal this sacred knowledge to a stranger, till he had been sent from

temple to temple, and made to undergo severe discipline. Pythagoras returned only to fall a martyr to the great psychologic truths that he first poured out upon the astonished mind of Greece. He wandered throughout Greece, in Delos, and Crete, in Sparta and Elis; everywhere neglected or regarded but as a madman, till he was driven from Samos and passed over into Italy. There he taught, and, as it is said, wrought miracles in the different colonies of Magna Grecia, Crotona, Metapontus, Rhegium, and Agrigentum. But the martyrdom of new truth pursued him. At Crotona his opponents burnt down his school, destroying in the flames forty of his chief disciples. Flying to Metapontus he himself was compelled to seek refuge in the temple of the Muses, and there perished by starvation. This was the penalty of Pythagoras for introducing spiritualism into Greece. After he had opened the way, a long train of good men sought in Egypt the fountains of ancient truth, which they clothed in new forms Dædalus, Homer, Democritus of Abdera, Enopis, Euripides, Eudoxus, Herodotus, Solon, and others.

But the priests imparted their secret and divine sciences unto them charily; and Homer represents his sorcerers as Egyptian, as Xenophon and Plato represent their ideals as Persian. The secret of the musical sounds emitted by the statue of Memnon at sunrise has never transpired. Yet all ancient authors attest the fact, and that it still continued to do so after Cambyses had had it opened to see whether it was caused by machinery. (Scholiastes Juvenalis.)

So profoundly secret did the Egyptian priests preserve their knowledge, that the vulgar multitude was suffered to worship all kind of animals: cats, apes, bulls, crocodiles (which had their sacred waters), and even winds and herbs. Diodorus Siculus, speaking of the gross superstition of the common people of Egypt, says that such was their worship of cats, that everyone killing one was put to death, and that in Ptolemy's time, a cat being killed by a Roman, the people flew to his dwelling, and that neither the fear of the Romans, who were making a league with Ptolemy, nor the influence