which sometimes accompany the four _Gospels_. We will also understand why Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, had so insisted upon the necessity of the _fourth_ gospel; giving as a reason that there could not be less than four of them, as there were _four_ zones in the world, and four principal winds coming from the four cardinal points, etc.[263] According to one of the Egyptian myths, the phantom-form of the isle of Chemmis (_Chemi_, ancient Egypt), which floats on the ethereal waves of the empyrean sphere, was called into being by Horus-Apollo, the sun-god, who caused it to evolve out of the mundane egg. In the cosmogonical poem of _Völuspa_ (the song of the prophetess), which contains the Scandinavian legends of the very dawn of ages, the phantom-germ of the universe is represented as lying in the _Ginnunga-gap_—or the cup of illusion, a boundless and void abyss. In this world’s matrix, formerly a region of night and desolation, _Nebelheim_ (the Mist-place) dropped a ray of cold light (æther), which overflowed this cup and froze in it. Then the Invisible blew a scorching wind which dissolved the frozen waters and cleared the mist. These waters, called the streams of _Elivâgar_, distilled in vivifying drops which, falling down, created the earth and the giant _Ymir_, who only had “the semblance of man” (male principle). With him was created the cow, _Audhumla_[264] (female principle), from whose udder flowed _four_ streams of milk,[265] which diffused themselves throughout space (the astral light in its purest emanation). The cow Audhumla produces a _superior_ being, called _Bur_, handsome and powerful, by licking the stones that were covered with _mineral salt_. Now, if we take into consideration that this mineral was universally {148} regarded by ancient philosophers as one of the chief formative principles in organic creation; by the alchemists as the universal menstruum, which, they said, was to be wrought from water; and by every one else, even as it is regarded now by science as well as in the popular ideas, to be an indispensable ingredient for man and beast; we may readily comprehend the hidden wisdom of this allegory of the creation of man. Paracelsus calls salt “the centre of water, wherein metals ought to die,” etc., and Van Helmont terms the _Alkahest_, “_summum et felicissimum omnium salium_,” the most successful of all salts.