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24 from Het-aat, the Lords of Protection, the masters of eternity and salvation. I came from Sais with the Mother-goddesses, who extended to me protection. The Lord of the Universe told me how to free the gods from all murderous diseases." Eminent men were called gods by the ancients. The deification of mortal men and supposititious gods is no more a proof against their monotheism than the monument-building of modern Christians, who erect statues to their heroes, is proof of their polytheism. Americans of the present century would consider it absurd in their posterity 3,000 years hence to classify them as idolaters for having built statues to their god Washington. So shrouded in mystery was the Hermetic Philosophy that Volney asserted that the ancient peoples worshipped their gross material symbols as divine in themselves; whereas these were only considered as representing esoteric principles. Dupuis, also, after devoting many years of study to the problem, mistook the symbolic circle, and attributed their religion solely to astronomy. Eberhart (Berliner Monatschrift) and many other German writers of the last and present centuries, dispose of magic most unceremoniously, and think it due to the Platonic mythos of the Timæus. But how, without possessing a knowledge of the mysteries, was it possible for these men or any others not endowed with the finer intuition of a Champollion, to discover the esoteric half of that which was concealed, behind the veil of Isis, from all except the adepts?

The merit of Champollion as an Egyptologist none will question. He declares that everything demonstrates the ancient Egyptians to have been profoundly monotheistical. The accuracy of the writings of the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, whose antiquity runs back into the night of time, is corroborated by him to their minutest details. Ennemoser also says: "Into Egypt and the East went Herodotus, Thales, Parmenides, Empedocles, Orpheus, and Pythagoras, to instruct themselves in Natural Philosophy and Theology." There, too, Moses acquired his wisdom, and Jesus passed the earlier years of his life.

Thither gathered the students of all countries before Alexandria was founded. "How comes it," Ennemoser goes on to say, "that so little has become known of these mysteries? through so many ages and amongst so many different times and people? The answer is that it is owing to the universally strict silence of the initiated. Another cause may be found in the destruction and total loss of all the written memorials of the secret knowledge of the remotest antiquity." Numa's books, described by Livy, consisting of treatises upon natural philosophy, were found in his tomb; but they were not allowed to be made known, lest they should reveal the most secret mysteries of the state religion. The