[Athens: Its Rise and Fall<br> Complete by Edward Bulwer-Lytton]@TWC D-Link book
Athens: Its Rise and Fall
Complete

CHAPTER V
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vi.) [45] The Anaglyph expressed the secret writings of the Egyptians, known only to the priests.

The hieroglyph was known generally to the educated.
[46] In Gaul, Cesar finds some tribes more civilized than the rest, cultivating the science of sacrifice, and possessed of the dark philosophy of superstitious mysteries; but in certain other and more uncivilized tribes only the elements and the heavenly luminaries (quos cernunt et quorum opibus aperte juvantur) were worshipped, and the lore of sacrifice was unstudied.

With the Pelasgi as with the Gauls, I believe that such distinctions might have been found simultaneously in different tribes.
[47] The arrival of Ceres in Attica is referred to the time of Pandion by Apollodorus.
[48] When Lobeck desires to fix the date of this religious union at so recent an epoch as the time of Solon, in consequence of a solitary passage in Herodotus, in which Solon, conversing with Croesus, speaks of hostilities between the Athenians and Eleusinians, he seems to me to fail in sufficient ground for the assumption.

The rite might have been instituted in consequence of a far earlier feud and league--even that traditionally recorded in the Mythic age of Erechtheus and Eumolpus, but could not entirely put an end to the struggles of Eleusis for independence, or prevent the outbreak of occasional jealousy and dissension.
[49] Kneph, the Agatho demon, or Good Spirit of Egypt, had his symbol in the serpent.

It was precisely because sacred with the rest of the world that the serpent would be an object of abhorrence with the Jews.
But by a curious remnant of oriental superstition, the early Christians often represented the Messiah by the serpent--and the emblem of Satan became that of the Saviour.
[50] Lib.ii., c.


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