As time wore on, Pantheism, which sees a deity everywhere, even within ourselves, regarded the terrestrial gods as earthly vessels animated with a spark of the Universal Soul. The subaltern deities, the objects of Sabæan worship, as the sun, the moon, and the fixed stars, were held to be superior mediating powers with the Almighty Power. A thousand interpretations, physical, symbolical, mystical, and astronomical, were framed by the wise of Memphis. And as amongst the Hindus, so the Deity of Egypt was, though revealed to the initiated, sedulously obscured to the vulgar by a host of Avatars and incarnations, of transmigrations and subordinate intelligences. History is silent upon that most interesting subject, the early connexion of India and Egypt. There are, however, still traces of its existence through Arabia, although Wilford greatly exaggerated the subject. Throughout Oman and Eastern Arabia there are traces to the present day of castish prejudice. No Kabílí, or man of noble tribe, however poor, will become a Haddâd (blacksmith), a Shámmár (shoemaker, in Hindustani Chamár), a Dabbagh (tanner), and a Nayyál (dyer). The Hindus of Maskat have an Avatar. Every Pandit knows that Shiva and his wife, under the names of Kapot-Eshwara and Kapot-Eshwari, visited Mecca, and were there worshipped under the form of male and female pigeons. This notes a direct communication along the coast of the Shepherd Kings. Again, it is possible that in ages now forgotten the Æthiopians may have received from the Hindus their arts, sciences, and civilization, which would naturally float northwards with the Nile. From Egypt these dogmas passed over to Greece, from Greece to the Rasenian people of ancient Etruria. This diffusion, proved by the similarity of their belief, is supported by old tradition. Herodotus explains the fable of the black pigeon that fled to Dodona, and there established the oracle on the ground that it was founded by a female captive from the Thebaïd. The manifest resemblance of the rites and ceremonies, the processions and mysteries, together with the historic fact that the greatest minds in Greece had studied with the priest-philosophers of Helispotes and Memphis, are the main points of circumstantial evidence whence rose Warburton’s luminous theory that the knowledge of the “Secret One” was preserved by the esoteric, but concealed for fear of the profane. He was an atheist who believed in a Single Deity because he thus degraded and dishonoured the vulgar gods; and the ancients, most pious men, solemnly tore to pieces all guilty of similar impiety. The Arcana, however, were sacred; under their shadow any dogma might flourish. Some ethnologists have wondered at the remarkable coincidences between the Etruscan cosmogony and that of Moses. The marvel is easily explained. Both systems were borrowed from the Egyptians “skilled in ancient learning” (Apuleius).