Thus the Egyptian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow; stars of Taurus the bull, those under which they began to plow; stars of Leo those under which lions, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin Virgo, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb Aries, stars of Capricorn, those under which these precious baby lambs and goats were brought forth: and thus was resolved the first part of the difficulty.
In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic at the summer solstice, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab or Cancer.
He named stars of the balance, or Libra, those where the days and nights, being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the Scorpio, those where certain periodical winds bring vapours, burning like the venom of the scorpion.
Gemini was human wedding season. Pisces was fishing season. Sagittarius was when they shot arrows in war and gazelle hunting.
They would say by a natural metaphor: The bull spreads over the earth the germs of fecundity (in spring) he restores vegetation and plenty: the lamb (or ram) delivers the skies from the maleficent powers of winter; he saves the world from the serpent of Ophiuchus (emblem of the humid season) and restores the empire of goodness (summer, joyful season): the scorpion pours out his venom on the earth, and scatters diseases and death. The same of all similar effects.
This language, understood by everyone, was attended at first with no inconvenience; but in the course of time, when the calendar had been regulated, the people, who had no longer any need of observing the heavens, lost sight of the original meaning of these expressions; and the allegories remaining in common use became a fatal stumbling block to the understanding and to reason. Habituated to associate to the symbols the ideas of their archetypes, the mind at last confounded them. The same emblems, whom fancy had transported to the skies, returned again to the earth; but being thus returned, clothed in the livery of the stars, they claimed the stellary attributes, and imposed on their own authors. Then it was that the people, believing that they saw their gods among them, could pray to them with more convenience: they demanded from the ram of their flock the influences which might be expected from the heavenly ram; they prayed the scorpion not to pour out his venom upon nature; they revered the crab and the fish, Cancer and Pisces, of the river Nile; and by a series of corrupt but inseparable analogies, they lost themselves in a labyrinth of well connected absurdities.
People of Japan, your bull, which breaks the cosmic egg, is only the bull of the zodiac, which in former times opened the seasons, the age of creation, the vernal equinox. It is the same bull Apis which Egypt adored, and which your ancestors, Jewish Rabbis, worshipped in the Golden Calf. This is still your bull, followers of Zoroaster, which, sacrificed in the symbolic mysteries of Mithra, poured out his blood which fertilized the earth. And ye Christians, your bull of the Apocalypse, with his wings, symbol of the Gospel of Luke, has no other origin; and your Lamb of God, sacrificed, like the bull of Mithra, for the salvation of the world, is only the same sun, in the sign of the celestial ram, which, in a later age, opening the equinox in his turn, was supposed to deliver the world from evil, that is to say, from the constellation of the serpent Ophiuchus, from that great snake, the parent of winter, the emblem of the Ahrimanes, or Satan of the Persians, your school masters. Yes, in vain does your imprudent zeal consign idolaters to the torments of the Tartarus which they invented; the whole basis of your system is only the worship of the sun, with whose attributes you have decorated your principal personage. It is the sun which, under the name of Horus, was born, like your God, at the winter solstice, in the arms of the celestial virgin Isis, and who passed a childhood of obscurity, indigence, and want, answering to the season of cold and frost. It is he that, under the name of Osiris, persecuted by Set the tyrant of the desert air, was put to death, shut up in a dark sarcophagus, emblem of the hemisphere of winter, and afterwards, ascending from the inferior zone towards the zenith of heaven, arose again from the dead triumphant over the angels of destruction.
Ye priests! who murmur at this relation, you wear his emblems all over your bodies; your tonsure is the disk of the sun; your stole is the zodiac; your rosaries are symbols of the stars and planets. Ye pontiffs and prelates! your mitre, your crozier, your mantle are those of Osiris; and that cross whose mystery you extol without comprehending it, is the ankh of Serapis, traced by the hands of Egyptian priests on the plan of the figurative world; which, passing through the equinoxes and the solstices, became the emblem of the future life and of the resurrection, because it touched the gates of ivory and of horn, through which the soul passed to heaven.
COUNT VOLNEY, "THE RUINS," ON THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION
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