John Fellows
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to ,www.million-books.com, where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book:: Symbolical Writing. The Egyptians, even the most ancient of them, were acquainted with the signs of the Zodiac. Their monuments, which are known to be of the earliest antiquity, are covered with figures, among which those of the crab and the wild goat, of the balance and the scorpion, of the ram and the bull, of the kid, the lion, the virgin, and the rest, are frequently found. The twelve symbolical names, which signify the twelve portions, both of the year and the heavens, were a prodigious help towards regulating the beginnings of sowing, mowing, harvest, and the other works of mankind. It was found very convenient, to expose in public a small figure, or 8 single letter, to notify the exact time when certain general works were to be begun in common, and when certain feasts were to be celebrated. The use of these figures appeared so convenient, that they by degrees extended it to more things than the order of the calendar. Several symbols, fit to inform the people of certain truths, by some analogy or relation between the figure and the thing they had a mind to have understood, were devised. This method of saying or showing one thing, to intimate others, is what induced among the eastern nations the ta'ste of allegories. They preserved, for a long time, the method of teaching every thing under symbols, calculated, by a mysterious outside, to excite curiosity, which was afterwards recompensed by the satisfaction of having discovered the truths which they concealed. Pythagoras, who had travelled among the eastern nations, thence brought that custom to Italy. Ham, and those of his descendants who came to inhabit the banks of the Nile, and the whole Lower Egypt, first tried to cultivate the earth according to the order of the year, and in the manner used in other ..
An Exposition of the Mysteries; Or, Religious Dogmas and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Pythagoreans, and Druids