The trinity in unity is an idea which all the ancient nations held in {160} common. The three Dejotas—the Hindu Trimurti; the _Three Heads_ of the Jewish Kabala.[285] “Three heads are hewn in one another and over one another.” The trinity of the Egyptians and that of the mythological Greeks were alike representations of the first triple emanation containing two male and one female principles. It is the union of the male _Logos_, or wisdom, the revealed Deity, with the female _Aura_ or _Anima Mundi_—“the holy _Pneuma_,” which is the _Sephira_ of the Kabalists and the _Sophia_ of the refined Gnostics—that produced all things visible and invisible. While the true metaphysical interpretation of this universal dogma remained within the sanctuaries, the Greeks, with their poetical instincts, impersonated it in many charming myths. In the _Dionysiacs_ of Nonnus, the god Bacchus, among other allegories, is represented as in love with the soft, genial breeze (the Holy Pneuma), under the name of _Aura Placida_.[286] And now we will leave Godfrey Higgins to speak: “When the _ignorant_ Fathers were constructing their calendar, they made out of this gentle zephyr two Roman Catholic saints!!” SS. Aura and Placida;—nay, they even went so far as to transfer the jolly god into St. Bacchus, and actually _show his coffin and relics at Rome_. The festival of the two “blessed saints,” Aura and Placida, occurs on the 5th of October, close to the festival of St. Bacchus.[287] How far more poetical, and how much greater the religious spirit to be found in the “heathen” Norse legends of creation! In the boundless abyss of the mundane pit, the Ginnunga-gap, where rage in blind fury and conflict cosmic matter and the primordial forces, suddenly blows the thaw-wind. It is the “unrevealed God,” who sends his beneficent breath from Muspellheim, the sphere of empyreal fire, within whose glowing rays dwells this great Being, far beyond the limits of the world of matter; and the _animus_ of the Unseen, the Spirit brooding over the dark, abysmal waters, calls order out of chaos, and once having given the impulse to all creation the FIRST CAUSE retires, and remains for evermore in _statu abscondito_![288]