* One universal mythos, or fable wearing the garb of history, has been the basis of all religions, ancient and modern. This mythos is rooted in, and has secret allusion to the zodiac and the solar system, in which the sun and the rest of the "Host of Heaven" were turned into imaginary personages, under peculiar nomenclatures in each country; and fanciful narratives concerning them, were invented by the astronomising priests, in order to stultify and subject the minds of the ignorant populace. This deception continues to the present day, for the solar mythos was the true Christianity. When the French, under Napoleon, possessed Italy, they examined the chair of St. Peter, and found upon it the signs of the zodiac. ** Nothing, says the Cardinal de Retz, convinces fools so much as that which they cannot comprehend.--Lucian Redivivus. *** As the ignorance of nations grows darker, priests of all religions see their way the more clearly. In regard to the theogony upon which these conjurors founded their various systems, it appears never to have been of the slightest importance whether it consisted of one, two, three, or thirty thousand divinities; though it must be confessed that the triune mythology of Christianity has answered, better than any other, the aristocratic purpose of general ignorance and oppression. Like their predecessors, its priests have governed solely in the names of their gods, whom on all occasions they cause to speak whatever is fitting and agreeable to sacerdotal interests and power; and all this passes as the commands of God, which, they declare, must take precedence of all civil affairs. From this usurpation is formed the almost insurmountable barrier against human liberty, "the _imperium in imperio_," or the visionary empire of supernaturalism within, and either confederate with, or independent of, the secular empire. All belief in anything supernatural is a pitiable and deplorable hallucination of mind, everything pretending to be such being the offspring of sheer imposture; and until the age of reason and science shall have succeeded those ages of delusion and ignorance through which the world has hitherto rolled, the paramount power upon its surface will be priestcraft. This craft is twin sister to witchcraft; and the former cherished and supported the latter as long as her head could be kept above water; but when the sun of science (the mortal foe of these two crafts) began to beam upon the imaginary hag, she sank to rise no more;* and men are now astonished at the credit she had gained in the world, and still more at the brutal ignorance which allowed her to shed so much innocent blood.** * Science having thus as it were suffocated the weird hag of witchcraft, a most useful auxiliary is gone of that religion which, more than all others, has been "Blood-nursed, and watered by the widow's tears."