Chapter IV. Further Consideration of the Physical System of the Egyptians, and That They Transferred the Whole Reference of Their Allegorical Theory Solely to the Visible Celestial Bodies, and to Water and Fire and the Other Elements of the Cosmos

[PORPHYRY] ‘FOR as to Chaeremon and the rest, they do not believe in anything else prior to the visible worlds, since they account as a ruling power the gods of the Egyptians, and no others except the so-called planets, and those stars which fill up the zodiac, and as many as rise near them: also the divisions into the “decani,” and the horoscopes, and the so-called “mighty Rulers,” the names of which are contained in the almanacks, and their powers to heal diseases, and their risings and settings, and indications of future events.

‘For he saw that those who assert the Sun to be the Creator twist the story of Osiris and Isis, and all the priestly legends, either into allusions to the stars and their appearances and disappearances and their solar distances at rising, or to the waxings and wanings of the moon, or to the course of the sun, or to the hemisphere of night, or of day, or to their river; and generally that they interpreted all things of physical phenomena, and nothing of incorporeal and living beings. And most of them made even our own free will depend upon the motion of the stars, binding all things down by indissoluble bonds, I know not how, to a necessity which they call fate, and making all things depend closely on these gods, whom, as the sole deliverers from the bonds of fate, they worship with temples, and statues, and the like.’

Let then this quotation from the before-mentioned Epistle suffice, clearly declaring, as it does, that even the secret theology of the Egyptians made no other gods than the stars in the heaven, both those which are called fixed, and the so-called planets, and introduced no incorporeal mind as creator of the universe, nor any creative reason, nor yet a god or gods, nor any intelligent and invisible powers, but only the visible Sun. “Wherefore also they referred the cause of the universe to the heavenly bodies alone, making all depend on fate, and the movement and course of the stars, as in fact this opinion has prevailed among them until now.

If therefore all is interpreted by the Egyptians of the visible elements of the world alone, and nothing of incorporeal and living beings, and if the elements and all visible bodies are by their own account inanimate and irrational, and in their nature fleeting and perishable,----see into what difficulties their theology has fallen again, in deifying inanimate substance and dead and irrational bodies, especially since they referred nothing to incorporeal and intelligent beings, nor to a mind and reason creating the universe.

But since it was acknowledged in the passages before quoted that their theological doctrines had been brought over to the Greeks from the Egyptians, it is time that the Greeks also should take their place with them, and give the same physiological explanations as the Egyptians, and be convicted of deifying nothing more than inanimate matter. For such were the august deities of the Egyptians according to the description of the writer before mentioned, who again, in the work which he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food,gives such details as the following concerning the same people: [1]

‘Starting from this discipline and intimacy with the deity, they judged that the divine pervaded not man only, nor did soul tabernacle upon earth in man alone, but all animals were pervaded by almost the same kind of soul. Wherefore they admitted every animal into their manufacture of gods, and mixed up beasts and men just alike, and also the bodies of birds and men.

‘For with them there is a figure represented like a man up to the neck, but having the face of a bird or a lion or some other animal: and, on the other hand again, the head of a man and members of some other animals, set partly below, and partly above. And hereby they indicate that according to the mind of the gods these animals also are associated one with another, and that it is not without a divine purpose that the wild beasts are bred up with us and tamed.

‘Hence also the lion is worshipped as a god, and a division of Egypt which they call a Nome has from the lion the name Leonto-polites, and another, from the cow, Busirites, and another, from the dog, Cynopolites. For the power which is over all they worshipped through the associated animals which each of the gods had given them.

‘Water and fire, the most beautiful of the elements, they reverence as being chief causes of our preservation, and exhibit them also in their temples; as, I believe, even now at the opening of the sanctuary of Serapis the worship is performed by means of fire and water, the precentor pouring out the water and exhibiting the fire, whenever he stands upon the threshold and wakes the god in the native language of the Egyptians.

‘They reverence, therefore, these elements that bear a part in the sacrifices, and above these they reverence most highly the things which are more fully associated with the sacrifices: and such are all living beings, for in the village Anabis they even worship a man, and sacrifice is there offered to him, and the victims are consumed by fire upon the altars: and yet presently he would eat the proper things prepared for him as a man. As, therefore, we ought to abstain from eating man’s flesh, so we should abstain from the flesh of other animals.

‘But further out of their abundant wisdom and their familiarity with the divine, they perceived that certain animals were more dear than men to certain of their gods, a hawk, for instance, to the Sun, as having its whole nature made up of blood and breath, and feding pity even for man, and shrieking over an exposed corpse, and scraping up earth over it.’

A little further on he says:

‘An ignorant person might detest a beetle, being without judgement in things divine: but the Egyptians reverenced it, as a living image of the sun. For every beetle is male, and deposits his spawn in a marsh, and having made it into a ball carries it back with his hind feet, as the sun does the heaven, and waits a lunar period of days.

‘In like manner they make some philosophic explanation concerning the ram, and another concerning the crocodile, and the vulture and the ibis, and generally as to each of the animals; so that out of their wisdom and their superior knowledge of things divine, they attained even to the worship of animals.’