The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of NatureVolney, C.-F. (Constantin-François)
Religion
The Ruins; Or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires and the Law of Nature
Volney, C.-F. (Constantin-François)
Ethics; History -- Philosophy; Religions; Revolutions
the words lykos, wolf, and lyke, light of the morning,
whence comes lux.
Dius, which is to be understood also of the sun, must be
derived from dih, a hawk. "The Egyptians," says Porphyry
(Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 92,) "represent the sun under the
emblem of a hawk, because this bird soars to the highest
regions of air where light abounds." And in reality we
continually see at Cairo large flights of these birds,
hovering in the air, from whence they descend not but to
stun us with their shrieks, which are like the monosyllable
dih: and here, as in the preceding example, we find an
analogy between the word dies, day, light, and dius, god,
sun.
"Such is the chain of ideas which the human mind had already run
through at an epoch previous to the records of history; and since their
continuity proves that they were the produce of the same series of
studies and labors, we have every reason to place their origin in Egypt,
the cradle of their first elements. This progress there may have been
rapid; because the physical priests had no other food, in the retirement
of the temples, but the enigma of the universe, always present to their
minds; and because in the political districts into which that country
was for a long time divided, every state had its college of priests,
who, being by turns auxiliaries or rivals, hastened by their disputes
the progress of science and discovery.*
* One of the proofs that all these systems were invented in
Egypt, is that this is the only country where we see a
complete body of doctrine formed from the remotest
antiquity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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