[Athens: Its Rise and Fall Complete by Edward Bulwer-Lytton]@TWC D-Link bookAthens: Its Rise and Fall Complete CHAPTER I 31/75
It may be said of the Greeks, that there never was a people who so completely nationalized all that they borrowed from a foreign source.
And whatever, whether in a remoter or more recent age, it might have appropriated from the creed of Isis and Osiris, one cause alone would have sufficed to efface from the Grecian the peculiar character of the Egyptian mythology. The religion of Egypt, as a science, was symbolical--it denoted elementary principles of philosophy; its gods were enigmas.
It has been asserted (on very insufficient data) that in the earliest ages of the world, one god, of whom the sun was either the emblem or the actual object of worship, was adored universally throughout the East, and that polytheism was created by personifying the properties and attributes of the single deity: "there being one God," says Aristotle, finely, "called by many names, from the various effects which his various power produces." [30] But I am far from believing that a symbolical religion is ever the earliest author of polytheism; for a symbolical religion belongs to a later period of civilization, when some men are set apart in indolence to cultivate their imagination, in order to beguile or to instruct the reason of the rest.
Priests are the first philosophers--a symbolical religion the first philosophy. But faith precedes philosophy.
I doubt not, therefore, that polytheism existed in the East before that age when the priests of Chaldea and of Egypt invested it with a sublimer character by summoning to the aid of invention a wild and speculative wisdom--by representing under corporeal tokens the revolutions of the earth, the seasons, and the stars, and creating new (or more probably adapting old and sensual) superstitions, as the grosser and more external types of a philosophical creed [31].
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