Oxley says: “_Apropos_ to this doctrine, I have in my possession two statuettes—one dating from the twenty-second dynasty, 900 B. c.—of Isis, crowned and nursing the babe Horus. On my return from Egypt through Italy, I obtained a statuette of Mary, crowned and nursing the babe Jesus, which is an exact copy of the Virgin and Child in the church of St. Augustine in Rome. _The figures are identical_.” Face to face with such a fact, who dare assert that the Egyptian Isis and Horus are a myth, and that the Christian Mary and Jesus are really historical? Some simple-minded ones beguile themselves with the delusion that these Egyptian and other heathen beliefs are prophecies of the real Jesus who in the fulness of time came down from heaven and was born of a virgin. But against this we have not only the actual claim of several Egyptian kings to be the “son of God according to promise or prophecy” (sixteen hundred years before Christ was born), but we have the fact of a whole nation _for thousands of years_ resting their hopes of eternal salvation upon a belief that “the son of God, Osiris, came down from heaven, took upon himself the mortal form, was slain by wicked hands, rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven, where he became the great judge of all mankind.” What adds to the difficulty is that _no dates_ are given in the writings of the early Christian authors, and, what is more, many of their names are evidently _noms de plume_; for instance, the arch-heretic _Arius_ and the great Nicene Council seem to resolve themselves simply into a controversy relating to the sun-god under the form of _Aries_ (the Ram or Lamb); and as to dates in connection therewith, they are simply Masonic points with an astronomical reference and symbolical meaning. In plain terms, nearly the whole of both the Old and New Testaments is an allegorical record of astral, solar, and planetary phenomena, with personages substituted for zodiacal signs; and with this key in hand the Hermetic student can unravel the allegories which are presented in such a form as to read like literal history.