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.[1]
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
- ↑ Celtic Druids, p. 291.
