Anacalypsis/Volume 1/Book 1/Chapter 1
ANACALYPSIS.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
AGE OF THE WORLD.—FLOOD.—PLANETS AND DAYS OF THE WEEK.—THE MOON.
1. On looking back into antiquity, the circle of vision terminates in a thick and impenetrable mist. No end can be distinguished. There seems reason to believe that this is an effect of that cause, whatever it may be, which first produced and gave law to the revolving motions of the planets, or other phenomena of nature, and therefore cannot be impugned, perhaps ought not to regretted. At all events, if this obscurity be regretted, it is pretty evident that there is little hope of its being removed. But in endeavouring to stretch our eye to the imaginary end of the prospect, to the supposed termination of the hitherto to us unbounded space, it is unavoidably arrested on its way by a variety of objects, of a very surprising appearance; and it is into their nature that I propose to inquire. When I look around me, on whatever side I cast my eyes, I see the ruins of a former world—proofs innumerable of a long-extended period of time. Perhaps among all the philosophers no one has demonstrated this so clearly as Mons. Cuvier. I apprehend these assertions are so well known and established that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them.
The great age of the world must be admitted; but the great age of man is a different thing. The latter may admit of doubt, and it is man with whom, in the following treatise, I propose to concern myself, and not his habitation. On man, his folly, his weakness, and, I am sorry I must add, his wickedness, I propose to treat: his habitation I leave to the geologists.
In the most early history of mankind I find all nations endeavouring to indulge a contemptible vanity, by tracing their origin to the most remote periods; and, for the gratification of this vanity, inventing fables of every description. Of this weakness they have all, in reality, been guilty; but the inhabitants of the oriental countries occupy rather a more prominent place than those of the western world; and I believe it will not be denied that, in the investigation of subjects connected with the first race of men, they are entitled on every account to claim a precedence. If, since the creation of man, a general deluge have taken place, their country was certainly the situation where he was preserved: therefore to the eastern climes I apply myself for his early history, and this naturally leads me into an inquiry into their ancient records and traditions.
2. All nations have a tradition of the destruction of the world by a flood,[1] and of the preservation of man from its effects. Here are two questions. Of the affirmative of the former no person who uses his eyes can doubt. But the latter is in a different predicament. A question may arise whether man existed before the flood above spoken of, or not. If the universality of a tradition of a fact of this nature would prove its truth, there would be scarcely room for doubt, and the previous creation of man would be established. But I think in the course of the following inquiry we shall find that universal tradition of a fact of this kind is not enough by itself for its establishment. It appears to me that the question of the existence of the human race previous to the flood will not much interfere with my inquiries, but will, if it be admitted, only oblige me to reason upon the idea that certain facts took place before it, and that the effects arising from them were not affected by it.
If I speak of persons or facts before the deluge, and it should be determined that the human species did not exist before that event, then the form of speech applied erroneously to the ante-diluvians must be held to apply to the earliest created of the post-diluvians; and this seems to me to be the only inconvenience which can arise from it. I shall therefore admit, for the sake of argument, that an universal flood took place, and that it happened after the creation of man.
Much difference of opinion has arisen upon the question whether the flood to which I have alluded was universal or not. The ancient records upon which Christians found their religion, as generally construed, maintain the affirmative; but no one who gives even a very slight degree of consideration to the circumstances of the Americas can deny that probability leans the contrary way. It is a very difficult question, but I do not consider that it has much concern with the object of this work.
Though it be the most probable, if man were created before the last general deluge, that a portion of the human race was saved along with the animals in the new, as well as a portion in the old world, yet it is equally probable that one family, or at most only a very small number of persons, were saved in the latter.
The strongest argument against the descent of the present human race from one pair has hitherto been found in the peculiar character of the Negro. But it is now admitted, I believe, that Mr. Lawrence has removed that difficulty, and has proved that man is one genus and one species, and that those who were taken by some philosophers for different species are only varieties. I shall assume this as a fact, and reason upon it accordingly. If there were any persons saved from the deluge except those before spoken of, who were found near the Caspian Sea, they do not appear to have made any great figure in the world, or to have increased so as to form any great nations. They must, I think, soon have merged and been lost in the prevailing numbers of the oriental nation. But I know not in history any probable tradition or circumstance, the existence of the Negro excepted, which should lead us to suppose that there ever were such persons. If they did exist, I think they must have been situated in China. It is possible that they may have been in that country, but it is a bare possibility, unsupported by any facts or circumstances known to us. No doubt the Chinese are entitled to what they claim—a descent from very remote antiquity. But it is acknowledged that one of their despots destroyed all their authentic and official records, in consequence of which little or no dependence can be placed upon the stories which they relate, of transactions which took place any length of time previous to that event.
The cautious way in which I reason above respecting the universal nature of the flood, and the conditional style of argument which I adopt in treating the question of man’s creation before or after it, no doubt will give offence to a certain class of persons who always go to another class, called priests, for permission to believe, without using their own understandings. I am sorry that I should offend these good people, but as I cannot oblige them by taking for granted the truth of alleged facts, the truth or falsity of which is, at least in part, the object of this work, it is clearly not fit, as it is not intended, for their perusal.
3. Of the formation of our planetary system, and particularly of our world and of man, a vast variety of accounts were given by the different philosophers of Greece and Rome, a very fair description of which may be met with in the first volume of the Universal History, and in Stanley’s History of Philosophy. Many of these cosmogonists have been highly celebrated for their wisdom; and yet, unless we suppose their theories to have been in a great degree allegorical, or to have contained some secret meaning, they exhibit an inconceivable mass of nonsense. But some of them, for instance that of Sanchoniathon, so largely discussed by Bishop Cumberland, are clearly allegorical: of course all such must be excepted from this condemnation.
If a person will apply his mind without prejudice to a consideration of the characters and doctrines of the ancient cosmogonists of the western part of the world, he must agree with me that they exhibit an extraordinary mixture of sense and nonsense, wisdom and folly—views of the creation, and its cause or causes, the most profound and beautiful, mixed with the most puerile conceits—conceits and fancies below the understanding of a plough-boy. How is this to be accounted for? The fact cannot be denied. Of the sayings of the wise men, there was not one, probably, more wise than that of the celebrated Γνωθι σεαυτον, Know thyself, and probably there was not one to which so little regard has been paid. It is to the want of attention to this principle that I attribute most of the absurdities with which the wise and learned, perhaps in all ages, may be reproached. Man has forgotten or been ignorant that his faculties are limited. He has failed to mark the line of demarcation, beyond which his knowledge could not extend. Instead of applying his mind to objects cognizable by his senses, he has attempted subjects above the reach of the human mind, and has lost and bewildered himself in the mazes of metaphysics. He has not known or has not attended to what has been so clearly proved by Locke, that no idea can be received except through the medium of the senses. He has endeavoured to form ideas without attending to this principle, and, as might well be expected, he has run into the greatest absurdities, the necessary consequence of such imprudence. Very well the profound and learned Thomas Burnet says,[2] “Sapientia prima est stultitia caruisse;” “primusque ad veritatem gradus præcavere errores.” Again he says, “Sapientis enim est, non tantum ea quæ sciri possunt, scire: sed etiam quæ sciri “non possunt, discernere et discriminare.”[3]
It must not be understood from what I have said, that I wish to put a stop to all metaphysical researches; far from it. But I do certainly wish to controul them, to keep them within due bounds, and to mark well the point beyond which, from the nature of our organization, we cannot proceed. Perhaps it may not be possible to fix the exact point beyond which the mind of man can never go, but it may be possible to say without doubt, of some certain point, beyond this he has not yet advanced. By this cautious mode of proceeding, though we may pretend to less knowledge, we may in fact possess more.
For these various reasons I shall pass over, without notice, the different theories of the formation of the world by the sages of Greece and Rome. In general they seem to me to deserve no notice, to be below the slightest consideration of a person of common understanding. As a curious record of what some of the wise men of antiquity were, they are interesting and worthy of preservation: as a rational exposé of the origin of things, they are nothing.
Among the subjects to which I allude as being above the reach of the human understanding are Liberty and Necessity, the Eternity of Matter, and several other similar subjects.
4. Our information of the historical transactions which it is supposed took place previous to the catastrophe,[4] and its attendant flood, which destroyed the ancient world, is very small. Mons. Bailly has observed, that the famous cycle of the Neros, and the cycle of seven days, or the week, from their peculiar circumstances, must probably have been of antediluvian invention. No persons could have invented the Neros who had not arrived at much greater perfection in astronomy than we know was the state of the most ancient of the Assyrians, Egyptians, or Greeks. The earliest of these nations supposed the year to have consisted of 360 days only, when the inventors of the Neros must have known its length to within a few seconds of time—a fact observed by Mons. Bailly to be a decisive proof that science was formerly brought to perfection, and therefore, consequently, must have been afterward lost. There are indeed among the Hindoos proofs innumerable that a very profound knowledge of the sciences was brought by their ancestors from the upper countries of India, the Himmalah mountains, Thibet or Cashmir. These were, I apprehend, the first descendants of the persons who lived after the deluge. But this science has long been forgotten by their degenerate successors, the present race of Brahmins. The ancient Hindoos might be acquainted with the Neros, but I think it probable that Josephus was correct in saying it is of antediluvian discovery; that is, that it was discovered previous to the time allotted for the deluge. And it is a curious circumstance that we receive this tradition from the people among whom we find the apparently antediluvian part of the book, or the first tract of the book, called Genesis, about which I shall have much more to observe in the course of this work.
The other cycle just now named, of the seven days or the week, is also supposed by Bailly to be, from its universal reception, of equal antiquity. There is no country of the old world in which it is not found, which, with the reasons which I will now proceed to state, pretty well justify Mons. Bailly in his supposition.
5. In my Preliminary Observations, and in my treatise on The Celtic Druids, I have pointed out the process by which the planetary bodies were called after the days of the week, or the days of the week after them. I have there stated that the septennial cycle would probably be among the earliest of what would be called the scientific discoveries which the primeval races of men would make.
Throughout all the nations of the ancient world, the planets are to be found appropriated to the days of the week. The seven-day cycle, with each day named after a planet, and universally the same day allotted to the same planet in all the nations of the world, constitute the first proof, and leave no room to doubt that one system must have prevailed over the whole. Here are the origin and the reason of all judicial astrology, as well as the foundation upon which much of the Heathen mythology was built. The two were closely and intimately connected.
It is the object of this work to trace the steps by which, from the earliest time and small beginnings, this system grew to a vast and towering height, covering the world with gigantic monuments and beautiful temples, enabling one part of mankind, by means of the fears and ignorance of the other part, to trample it in the dust.
Uncivilized man is by nature the most timid of animals, and in that state the most defenceless. The storm, the thunder, the lightning, or the eclipse, fills him with terror. He is alarmed and trembles at every thing which he does not understand, and that is almost every thing that he sees or hears.
If a person will place himself in the situation of an early observer of the heavenly bodies, and consider how they must have appeared to him in his state of ignorance, he will at once perceive that it was scarcely possible that he could avoid mistaking them for animated or intelligent beings. To us, with our prejudices of education, it is difficult to form a correct idea of what his sensations must have been, on his first discovering the five planets to be different from the other stars, and to possess a locomotive quality, apparently to him subject to no rule or order. But we know what happened; he supposed them animated, and to this day they are still supposed to be so, by the greatest part of the world. Even in enlightened England judicial astrologers are to be found.
I suppose that after man first discovered the twenty-eight day cycle, and the year of 360 days, he would begin to perceive that certain stars, larger than the rest, and shining with a steady and not a scintillating light, were in perpetual motion. They would appear to him, unskilled in astronomy, to be endowed with life and great activity, and to possess a power of voluntary motion, going and coming in the expanse at pleasure. These were the planets. A long time would pass before their number could be ascertained, and a still longer before it could be discovered that their motions were periodical. The different systems of the ancient philosophers of Greece and other countries, from their errors and imperfections, prove that this must have been the state of the case. During this period of ignorance and fear arose the opinion, that they influenced the lot of man, or governed this sublunary world; and very naturally arose the opinion that they were intelligent beings. And as they appeared to be constantly advancing towards and receding from the sun, the parent of life and comfort to the world, they were believed to be his ministers and messengers. As they began in some instances to be observed to return, or be visible in the same part of the heavens, they would naturally be supposed by the terrified barbarian to have duties to perform; and when the very ancient book of Job[5] represents the morning stars to have sung together, and all the sons of God to have shouted for joy, it probably does not mean to use merely a figurative expression, but nearly the literal purport of the language.
In contemplating the host of heaven, men could not fail soon to observe that the fixed stars were in a particular manner connected with the seasons—that certain groups of them regularly returned at the time experience taught them it was necessary to commence their seed-time or their harvest; but that the planets, though in some degree apparently connected with the seasons, were by no means so intimately and uniformly connected with them as the stars. This would be a consequence which would arise from the long periods of some of the planets—Saturn, for instance. These long periods of some of the planets would cause the shortness of the periods of others of them to be overlooked, and would, no doubt, have the effect of delaying the time when their periodical revolutions would be discovered; perhaps for a very long time: and, in the interim, the opinion that they were intelligent agents would be gaining ground, and receiving the strengthening seal of superstition; and, if a priesthood had arisen, the fiat of orthodoxy.
From these causes we find that, though in judicial astrology or magic the stars have a great influence, yet that a great distinction is made between them and the planetary bodies; and I think that, by a minute examination of the remaining astrological nonsense which exists, the distinction would be found to be justified, and the probability of the history here given confirmed.
As it has been observed, though the connexion between the planets and the seasons was not so intimate as that between the latter and the stars, yet still there was often an apparent connexion, and some of the planets would be observed to appear when particular seasons arrived, and thus after a certain time they were thought to be beneficent or malevolent, as circumstances appeared to justify the observers’ conclusions.
6. Of the different histories of the creation, that contained in the book, or collection of books, called Genesis, has been in the Western parts of the world the most celebrated, and the nonsense which has been written respecting it, may fairly vie with the nonsense, a little time ago alluded to, of the ancient learned men of Greece and Rome.
This book professes to commence with a history of the creation, and in our vulgar translation it says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But I conceive for the word heavens the word planets ought to be substituted. The original for the word heavens is of great consequence. Parkhurst admits that it has the meaning of placers or disposers. In fact, it means the planets as distinguished from the fixed stars, and is the foundation, as I have said, and as we shall find, upon which all judicial astrology, and perhaps much of the Heathen mythology, was built.
After man came to distinguish the planets from the stars, and had allotted them to the respective days of the week, he proceeded to give them names, and they were literally the Dewtahs of India, the Archangels of the Persians and Jews, and the most ancient of the Gods of the Greeks and Romans, among the vulgar of whom each planet had a name, and was allotted to, or thought to be, a God.
The following are the names of the Gods allotted to each day: Sunday to the Sun, Monday to the Moon, Tuesday to Mars, Wednesday to Mercury, Thursday to Jupiter, Friday to Venus, and Saturday to Saturn: and it is worthy of observation, that neither Bacchus nor Hercules is among them; on which I shall have an observation to make in a future part of this work. In almost every page we shall have to make some reference to judicial astrology, which took its rise from the planetary bodies.
The Sun, I think I shall shew, was unquestionably the first object of the worship of all nations. Contemporaneously with him or after him succeeded, for the reasons which I have given, the planets. About the time that the collection of planets became an object of adoration, the Zodiac was probably marked out from among the fixed stars, as we find it in the earliest superstitions of the astrologers. Indeed, the worship of the equinoctial sun in the sign Taurus, the remains of which are yet found in our May-day festivals, carries it back at least for 4,500 years before Christ. How much further back the system may be traced, I pretend not to say.[6]
7. After the sun and planets it seems, on first view, probable that the moon would occupy the next place in the idolatrous veneration of the different nations; but I am inclined to think that this was not the case. Indeed, I very much doubt whether ever he or she, for it was of both genders, was an object of adoration at all in the very early periods. I think it would be discovered so soon that its motions were periodical, that there would be scarcely any time for the error to happen; for I cannot conceive it possible that it should have been thought to be an intelligent being after once its periodical nature was discovered.
This doctrine respecting the Moon will be thought paradoxical and absurd, and I shall be asked what I make of the goddess Isis. I reply, that it is the inconsistencies, contradictions, and manifest ignorance of the ancients respecting this goddess, which induce me to think that the Moon never was an object of worship in early times; and that it never became an object of adoration till comparatively modern times, when the knowledge of the ancient mysteries was lost, and not only the knowledge of the mysteries, but the knowledge of the religion itself, or at least of its origin and meaning, were lost. The least attention to the treatises of Plato, Phornutus, Cicero, Porphyry, and, in short, of every one of the ancient writers on the subject of the religion, must convince any unprejudiced person that they either were all completely in the dark, or pretended to be so. After the canaille got to worshipping onions, crocodiles, &c., &c., &c., no doubt the moon came in for a share of their adoration; but all the accounts of it are full of inconsistency and contradiction: for this reason I think it was of late invention, and that Isis was not originally the moon, but the mother of the gods. Many other reasons for this opinion will be given in the course of the work, when I come to treat of Isis and the Moon.
- ↑ The nature of this flood I shall discuss in a future chapter.—June, 1830.
- ↑ Arch. Phil. cap. vii.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 95.
- ↑ This catastrophe has been thought by many of the moderns to have arisen from a change of the direction of the earth’s axis, and a simultaneous, or perhaps consequent, change of the length of the year from 360 to 365 days. The change of the axis was believed among the ancients by Plato, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Diogenes, Leucippus, and Democritus. Vide book ii. ch. iv, of Thomas Burnet’s Archæologia Philosophica.
- ↑ Chap. xxviii. ver. 7.
- ↑ Celtic Druids, p. 291.