chus; and hence we find the symbols both of the destroying and generative attributes upon tombs, signifying the separation and regeneration of the soul performed by the same power. Those of the latter are, in many instances, represented by very obscene and licentious actions, even upon sepulchral monuments; as appears from many now extant, particularly one lately in the Farnese palace at Rome. The Canobus of the Ægyp tians appears to have been a personification of the same attribute as the Bacchus AIKNITHΣ of the Greeks: for he was represented by the filtering-vase, which is still employed to purify and render potable the waters of the Nile; and these waters, as before observed, were called the defluxion of Osiris, of whom the soul was supposed to be an emanation. The means, therefore, by which they were purified from all grosser matter, might properly be employed as the symbol of that power, which separated the ætherial from the terrestrial soul, and purified it from all the pollutions and incumbrances of corporeal substance. The absurd tale of Canobus being the deified Pilate of Menelaus is an invention of the later Greeks, unworthy of any serious notice. 166. The rite of Ablution in fire and water, so generally practised among almost all nations of antiquity, seems to have been a mystic representation of this purification and regeneration of the soul after death. It was performed by jumping three times through the flame of a sacred fire, and being sprinkled with water from a branch of laurel; or else by being bedewed with the vapor from a sacred brand, taken flaming from the altar and dipped in water.3 The exile at his return, and the bride at her marriage, went through ceremonies of this kind to signify their purification and regeneration for a new life; and they appear 'Mystica vannus Iacchi. Georg. i. 166. Osiris has the winnow in one hand, and the hook of attraction in the other; which are more distinctly expressed in the large bronze figure of him engraved in pl. ii. of vol i. of the Select Specimens, than in any other that we know. Even in the common small figures it is strange that it should ever have been taken for a whip; though it might reasonably have been taken for a flail, had the ancients used such an instrument in thrashing corn. 2 Certe ego transilui positas ter in ordine flammas, Ovid. Fast. lib. iv. ver. 727. 3. Εστι δε χερνή ύδωρ εις ὁ απέβαπτον δελον εκ του βωμου λαμβάνοντες, εφ' οὗ την θυσίαν επετέλουν· και τούτῳ περιβαίνοντες τους παροντας Αγνιζον. Athen. lib. ix. p. 409. ✦ Ovid. ibid. v. 792. et Cnippin. Not. in eund. Το πυρ καθαίρει και το ύδωρ άγνιζει, δει δε και καθαραν και άγνην διαμενειν την γαμηθεισαν. Plutarch. Quæst. Rom. i. Βουλομένη δε αυτον αθανατον ποιησαι, τας νύκτας εις πυρ κατετίθει το βρέφος, και Tepingel Tas OvNTas σapnas avrov. Apollodor. Biblioth. lib. i. c. v. s. 2. to have been commonly practised as modes of expiation or extenuation for private or secret offences. A solemn ablution, too, always preceded initiation into the Egyptian and Eleusinian mysteries; and when a Jewish proselyte was admitted, he was immersed in the presence of three witnesses, after being circumcised, but before he was allowed to make the oblation by which he professed himself a subject of the true God. As this ceremony was supposed to wash off all stains of idolatry, the person immersed was said to be regenerated, and animated with a new soul; to preserve which in purity, he abandoned every former connexion of country, relation, or friend.3 167. Purification by fire is still in use among the Hiudoos, as it was among the earliest Romans; and also among the native Irish; men, women, and children, and even cattle, in Ireland, leaping over, or passing through the sacred bonfires annually kindled in honor of Baal; an ancient title of the Sun, which seems to have prevailed in the Northern as well as Eastern dialects: whence arose the compound titles of the Scandina vian deities, Baldur, Habaldur, &c. expressing different personified attributes. This rite was probably the abomination, so severely reprobated by the sacred historians of the Jews, of parents making their sons and daughters pass through the fire: for, in India, it is still performed by mothers passing through the flames with their children in their arms; and though commentators have construed the expression in the Bible to mean the burning them alive, as offerings to Baal Moloch, it is more consonant to reason, as well as to history, to suppose that it alluded to this more innocent mode of purification and consecration to the Deity, which continued in use among the ancient inhabitants of Italy to the later periods of Heathenism; when it was performed exactly as it is now in Ireland, and held to be a holy and mystic means of communion with the great active principle of the universe. Ovid. ib. lib. v. 679. 2 Apuleii Metamorph. lib. ix. Diodor. Sic. lib. i. 3 Marsham Canon Chronic. s. ix. p. 192. 4 Πυρκαίας προ των σκηνών γενεσθαι κελευσας (ὁ Ρωμυλος), εξάγει τον λεων τας φλο yas iπeр@pwσxoνTH THE SOLNOWS TWY owμaruv ivixa. Dionys. Hal. A. R. l. lxxxviii. s Collectan. de reb. Hibernic. No. v. p. 64. 6 Ol. Rudbeck. Atlant. P. ii. c. v. p. 140. 7 Ayeen Akbery, and Maurice's Antiquities of India, vol. v. p. 1075. Expositus mos est: moris mihi restat origo. 168. It must, however, bé admitted that the Carthaginians and other nations of antiquity did occasionally sacrifice their children to their gods, in the most cruel and barbarous manner; and, indeed, there is scarcely any people whose history does not afford some instances of such abominable rites. Even the patriarch Abraham, when ordered to sacrifice his only son, does not appear to have been surprised or startled at it; neither could Jephtha have had any notion that such sacrifices were odious or even unacceptable to the Deity, or he would not have considered his daughter as included in his general vow, or imagined that a breach of it in such an instance could be a greater crime than fulfilling it. Another mode of mystic purification was the Taurobolium, Egobolium, or Criobolium of the Mithraic rites; which preceded Christianity but a short time in the Roman empire, and spread and florished with it. The catechumen was placed in a pit covered with perforated boards; upon which the victim, whether a bull, a goat, or a ram, was sacrificed so as to bathe him in the blood which flowed from it. To this the compositions, so frequent in the sculptures of the third and fourth centuries, of Mithras the Persian Mediator, or his female personification a winged Victory, sacrificing a bull, seem to allude: but all that we have seen are of late date, except a single instance of the Criobolium or Victory sacrificing a ram, on a gold coin of Abydos, in the cabinet of Mr. Payne Knight, ` which appears anterior to the Macedonian conquest. 169. The celestial or ætherial soul was represented in symbolical writing by the butterfly; an insect which first appears from the egg in the shape of a grub, crawling upon the earth, and feeding upon the leaves of plants. In this state it was aptly made an emblem of man in his earthly form; when the ætherial vigor and activity of the celestial soul, the divinæ particula mentis, was clogged and encumbered with the materia! body. In its next state, the grub becoming a chrysalis appeared, by its stilness, torpor, and insensibility, a natural image of death, or Omnia purgat edax ignis, vitiumque metallis An, quod in his vitæ caussa est; hæc perdidit exul : See Bassirel. di Roma, tav. lviii.-lx. &c. Ovid. Fast. lib. iv. 781. the intermediate state between the cessation of the vital functions of the body, and the emancipation of the soul in the funeral pile: and the butterfly breaking from this torpid chrysalis, and mounting in the air, afforded a no less natural image of the celestial soul bursting from the restraints of matter, and mixing again with its native æther. Like other animal symbols, it was by degrees melted into the human form; the original wings only being retained, to mark its meaning. So elegant an allegory would naturally be a favorite subject of art among a refined and ingenious people; and it accordingly appears to have been more diversified and repeated by the Greek sculptors, than almost any other, which the system of emanations, so favorable to art, could afford. Being, however, a subject more applicable and interesting to individuals than communities, there is no trace of it upon any coin, though it so constantly occurs upon gems. 170. The fate of the terrestrial soul, the regions to which it retired at the dissolution of the body, and the degree of sensibility which it continued to enjoy, are subjects of much obscurity, and seem to have belonged to the poetry, rather than to the religion, of the ancients. In the Odyssey it is allowed a mere miserable existence in the darkness of the polar regions, without any reward for virtue or punishment for vice; the punishments described being evidently allegorical, and perhaps of a different, though not inferior author. The mystic system does not appear to have been then known to the Greeks, who catched glimmering lights and made up incoherent fables from various sources. Pindar, who is more systematic and consistent in his mythology than any other poet, speaks distinctly of rewards and punishments; the latter of which he places in the central cavities of the earth, and the former in the remote islands of the ocean, on the other side of the globe; to which none were admitted, but souls that had transmigrated three times into different bodies, and lived piously in each; after which they were to enjoy undisturbed happiness in this state of ultimate bliss, under the mild rule of Rhadamanthus, the associate of KPONOX or Time.' A similar region of bliss in the extremities of the earth is spoken of in the Odyssey; but not as the retreat of the dead, but a 1 Olymp. ii. 108-123. &c. Τοισι δε λάμπει μεν μινος αελίου των ενθαδε νυκτα κατω. Id. apud Plutarch. de Cons. ad Apoll. in ed. Heyn. Pind. inter fragm. c threnis. i. country which Menelaus was to visit while living.1 Virgil has made up an incoherent mixture of fable and allegory, by bringing the regions of recompense, as well as those of punishment, into the centre of the earth; and then giving them the aetherial light of the celestial luminaries, without which even his powers of description could not have embellished them to suit their purpose. He has, also, after Plato,3 joined Tartarus to them, though it was not part of the regions regularly allotted to the dead by the ancient Greek mythologists; but a distinct and separate world beyond chaos, as far from earth, as earth from heaven.* According to another poetical idea, the higher parts of the sublunary regions were appropriated to the future residence of the souls of the great, and good, who alone seemed deserving of inmortality. 171. Opinions so vague and fluctuating had of course but little energy; and accordingly we never find either the hope of reward, or the fear of punishment after death, seriously employed by the Greek and Roman moralists as reasonable motives for human actions; or considered any otherwise than as matters of pleasing speculation or flattering error. Among the barbarians of the North, however, the case was very different. They all implicitly believed that their valor in this life was to be rewarded in the next, with what they conceived to be the most exquisite of all possible enjoyments. Every morning they were to fight a great and promiscuous battle; after which Odin was to restore the killed and wounded to their former strength and vigor, and provide a sumptuous entertainment for them in his hall, where they were to feed upon the flesh of a wild boar, and drink mead and ale out of the skulls of their enemies till night, when they were to be indulged with beautiful women. Mankind in general Odyss. A. 561. 3 Phæd. p. 83. 4 Solemque suum, sua sidera norunt. Æn. vi. 641. ·Пegny xatos Copgolo. Hesiod. Theog. v. 720. Τόσσον ενερθ' αίδεω, ὅσον ουραγός εστ' απο γαίης. Homer, Il. Θ. Milton's Hell is taken from the Tartarus of Hesiod, or whoever was the author of the Theogony which bears his name. His descriptions of Chaos are also drawn from the same source. 5 Quæ niger astriferis connectitur axibus aër, Fecit, et æternos animam collegit in orbes. 6 Juvenal. Sat. ii. 149. Lucan. Phars. i. 458. 7 Mallet Introd. à l'Hist. de Danemarc. Lucan. Pharsal. ix. 5. |