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 intelli-
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.
