entirely confirms the statements of the Book of Genesis.' 1 The Egyptians were a people who immigrated from Asia into the valley of the Nile. The whole valley was peopled from Asia; and to this day the inhabitants bear the evident marks of an Asiatic and Caucasian origin.' Whether Dionysos is a Semitic and Asiatic divinity is the chief question of the present enquiry, and the reader will draw his own conclusions from the whole of the evidence offered, remembering especially the connection between the god and Adonis. It will also be recollected that he was of Semitic origin, according to the Lydian theory of Euripides, who especially calls the Bakchai Asiatic. 5 VI. They are both many-named and manifold in nature. Thus Diodoros notes that Uasar is called Dionysos, Seirios, Phanetes, Sarapis, Plouton, Ammon, Zeus, and Pan; and that Uasi is called Demeter, Thesmophoros, Selene, Here, etc.; while Ploutarchos calls her Myrionymos, the goddess of a thousand names, which, as we have seen, is most appropriately an epithet of Dionysos.7 The prayers of the dead contain a countless multitude of names by which Osiris is invoked.'8 Similarly sings the Roman poet: 6 6 Bacchumque vocant, Bromiumque, Lyaeumque, They are also both almost infinitely manifold in nature, being solar, astral, phallic, kosmogonic, chthonian, and psychical; in fact, two such highly complex and intricate concepts, and yet so wonderfully similar and corresponding, that their independent evolution is an improbability amounting almost to an impossibility. The only question fairly remaining for discussion is whether the one is derived from the other, or whether they are both elaborated from a common original. 3 VII. They are both chested.-Uasar, according to the story in Ploutarchos, got into the coffin or chest which the wicked Typhon had prepared for him, to see if it would fit him, on which Typhon and the other conspirators nailed down the lid, poured hot lead over it, and threw it into the river, from whence it was carried down into the sea, and was ultimately washed ashore near Byblos in Phoenicia.1 Thus Uasar, like that great Kamic minister Yousaiph,2 was chested' or 'put in a coffin in Egypt.' This history of Adonis is similar. The beautiful babe was placed in a chest and put in the hands of Persephone, the queen of the Under-world.'4 So Semele and the infant Dionysos were said to have been enclosed by Kadmos in a chest, which, being thrown into the sea, was washed up on the Argolik coast. These chests are another form of the mythic egg, sire of Uasar and Dionysos, and of all things, that mystic egg which appears in most theogonies, and which, as Creuzer and Bunsen have demonstrated, was not laid by the NeoPlatonists.' 9 An Egyptian inscription at Philae, of the time of the Romans, speaks of the father of the begin 1 Peri Is. xiii.-xviii. 2 Joseph. 8 3 Cf. the following passages from the Funereal Ritual:-Thou mayest approach, borne, oh Sun! in his chest' (cxxxiii.). Hail, oh thou Sun! in his ark' (cxxxiv.). 'Well is the Great One who is in the chest, so is Osiris' (clxii.). 4 Mythol. of the Aryan Nations, 6 nings, creating the egg of the sun and moon, first of the gods of the Upper-world.' And the egg was known and revered far and wide, for even Finn cosmogonists believed the earth and heaven to be made out of a severed egg, the upper concave shell representing heaven, the yolk earth, and the crystal surrounding fluid the circumambient ocean.' This mysterious kosmic egg is frequently alluded to in the Kamic Funereal Ritual. Oh. Tum [the Creator] give me the delicious breath of thy nostril. I am the Egg of the Great Cackler [Seb, the father of Uasar; his emblem was the goose.]* I have watched this great egg which Seb prepared for the earth. I 2 grow, it grows in turn; I live, it lives in turn, stimulating the breath.' I live, it lives; I breathe air, it breathes air, in Kerneter.' That is, the justified and perfected Uasarian is ultimately identified with, and becomes part of, all kosmic life, yet occultly retaining a personal potency. I have been made a Lord of the Age, who has no limit, for I am an Eternal Substance. I am Tum, made for ever.'7 And so, according to the Orphik Poet, Protogonos the First-born is Oögenes the Egg-sprung; 8 and, as Ploutarchos informs us, a symbolical egg was consecrated in the Orgies of Dionysos as a representation of self-contained generation. This egg, ark, chest, or coffin, also appears as the mystic ship or boat, Argo, connected alike with the cult of Uasi, of Athene, of a divinity of the rude German tribes,10 identified by Grimm with a goddess Ziza,' 11 and of various other personages. It reappears in the shell of Aphrodite, and in the ship borne in solemn procession to the Parthenon on the great Pana 2S. B. Gould, Curious Myths, 415. 3 Cf. Gen. ii. 7. Cf. Herod. ii. 72. 5 Funereal Ritual, liv. Ibid. lvi.; cf. Caps. xvii. xxii. thenaic festival, as the phallos was carried before the god in the great feasts of Dionysos.'1 The symbolism is sufficiently obvious, both in its anthropomorphic and in its kosmical connection. The ship is the boat of the sun, which in the Kamic Funereal Ritual contains the gods, and is almost overturned by the terrific struggles of Apepi, the great serpent of evil; but which ultimately ' attains the extreme limit of the horizon, and disappears in the heavenly region of Amenti.' 2 Apuleius,3 in describing the procession of Uasi, states that one of the priests held a golden lamp of a boat-like form,' and that the chief priest dedicated to the goddess a very skilfully built ship, pictured all over with the curious hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, after having most carefully purified it with a lighted torch, an egg, and sulphur.' Nor was the mystic chest absent, for another priest carried a chest containing the secret utensils of this stupendous mystery.' 'Some of the sacred boats or arks contained the emblems of life and stability, which, when the veil was drawn aside, were partially seen ;'* and, as Mr. Cox well notes, these ships, chests, or boats, are the kistai mustikai of the Mysteries, and we see them in the chest or coffin of Osiris.'" One suggested derivation of the name Thebai is tebah, a box or chest, the name given to Noah's ark, the Kibotos of the LXX.; so that in this connection the Phoenician city, whose kosmogonic character has already been alluded to, becomes an image of the mighty world,' of the kosmic egg itself, and is thus a suitable abode for the cult of the manifold and all-animating Dionysos. But whether presented in the form and under the symbol of chest or coffin, ark or egg, ship or 1 Mythol. of the Aryan Nations, ii. 118. 2 Cooper, Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt, 41; Cf. Funereal Ritual, xcviii. De Asino Aureo, lib. xi. 4 Sir G. Wilkinson in Rawlinson's Herodotus, ii. 86. 5 Vide inf. VI. i. 1. Mythol. of the Aryan Nations, ii. 119, Note. 7 Sup. IV. iii. 1. boat, and whether in connection with a male or female divinity, the idea is one and the same. Uasar or Dionysos, as Erikepeios the vital force and life-heat of the vast visible world, acted upon by the infinite creating power, burst the egg of darkness and chaos, and produced in grand procession the generation of heaven and earth and all things animate and inanimate. Darkly, and indeed sensuously, the myth throughout all its concealments and obscurity endeavours confusedly to set forth the sublime truth that 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,' that is, brooded dove-like over them,1 the simile being taken from a bird in the state of incubation." The terms used depicting the attitude convey to us, with the most vivid delineation and colouring, that Godlike love was the motive power,' that Love, or Heavenly Eros, which, rejoices in its works.' 4 There is yet another symbol of this multiform chest, i.e. the mystic Kalathos, or Basket of Demeter the All-mother," which was carried in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and which reappears in the hands of Assyrian divinities." VIII. They are both connected with ivy.-As the gods of life and immortality, Uasar and Dionysos are connected with ivy never sere.'7 Ivy, Diodoros tells us, is called in the Egyptian language Osiris plant.'8 But it is to be observed that ivy is not a plant of the Nile,' and Sir G. Wilkinson remarks that wreaths and festoons of ivy, or rather of the wild convolvulus or of the Periploca secamone, often appear at Egyptian fêtes.' The connection between Dionysos and ivy has been already sufficiently noticed. 1 Cf. Milton, Par. Lost, i. 20. 2 Cf. Rev. R. G. S. Browne, The Mosaic Cosmogony, 25. 3 Ibid. 26. 4 Cf. Ps. civ. 31. 5 Cf. Kallim. Hymnos eis Dem. Vide inf. VIIÏ. ii. Jar. 7 The shape of the leaf, in which some discern a phallic emblem, has been suggested as another link between them and the plant. 8 Diod. i. 17; cf. Plout. Peri Is. xxxvii. 9 Rawlinson, Herodotus, ii. 74. |