ON THE PROMETHEUS OF ESCHYLUS.

An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian, in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of Literature. May 18, 1825.

THE French savans who went to Egypt in the train of Bonaparte, Denon, Fourrier, and Dupuis (it has been asserted), triumphantly vindicated the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of documents that can not lie;-namely, the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous masses of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according to an inscription 'which can not lie,' the temple of Esne is of eight thousand years' standing.

Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an inscription lying; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it; and lastly, the incredibility of a French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples themselves, the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain astrological theories; or the temples themselves may have been built in the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or significant characters; and these may have been intentionally, or ignorantly, miscopied or mistranslated.

But more than all the preceding,-I can not but persuade myself, that for a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense-a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human nind, and the rules generalized from the great mass of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached documents or narrations, of whatever authority the nar

rator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the documents-I can not but persuade myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first book of the Pentateuch,--and which, in perfect accordance with all analogous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to anticipate, conveys to us the rapid progress in civilization and splendor from Abraham and Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh,— will be worth a whole library of such inferences.

I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of Egypt; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this assumption in proof of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological superstitions,—of certain talismans connected with star-magic,— plates and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and influences of celestial bodies, there doubtless exist hints, if not direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each signifying a several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch; and when I collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired writings subsequent to the Mosaic, I can not but regard the absence of any such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful assertions, or evident implications, of Egyptian idolatry in the former, both as an argument of incomparatively greater value in support of the age and authenticity of the Pentateuch; and as a strong presumption in favor of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will pervade this series of disquisitions;-namely, that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or worship of the world as God.

The reason or pretext, assigned by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren, the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their sacrifices would be an abomination to

the Egyptians, may be urged as inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I reply, first, that the worship of the ox and cow was not, in and of itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment, though a very gross breach of the second-for it is most certain that the ten tribes worshipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols :-secondly that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the worship of nature, or the 1ò này, as God. In after-times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole world,the positive and negative forces in the science of superstition ;for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be assigned for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes : but the second and the most important step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared under European civilization, the charms of a wandering life have been found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been induced to return (see the confession in the preamble to the statute respecting the gipsies); -how much greater must have been the danger of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed population? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the priestly kings (for the priestly is ever the first form of government)devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege?-For this

* The Act meant is probably the 5 Eliz. c. 20, enforcing the two previous Acts of Henry VIII. and Philip and Mary, and reciting that natural born Englishmen had become of the fellowship of the said vagabonds, by transforming or disguising themselves in their apparel,' &c.-Ed.

rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible; in which the flesh of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of mankind; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed population. In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,-for so the consecrated animals were called, isgoi kóyos,-became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Tine, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their gods.

The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most. simply and generally expressed in the following formula, in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G.

W—G = 0;

or the World without God is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse

for which the theist substitutes

G-W=0;

G-W=G;

or that

GG, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to G + W.*

Before the mountains were, Thou art.-I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential dis

Mr. Coleridge was in the constant habit of expressing himself on paper by the algebraic symbols. They have an uncouth look in the text of an ordinary essay, and I have sometimes ventured to render them by the equivalent words. But most of the readers of these volumes will know that means less by, or, without; +more by, or, in addition to;= equal to, or, the same as-Ed.

tinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations.

The objects which, on my appointment as Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were, 1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other:-2d. The connec tion of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius :-3d. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks: and, lastly from all these,-namely, the mysteries, the sacerdotal religion, their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric poetry and the legendary belief of the people, and from the sources and productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks to give a juster and more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine providence, than I have hitherto seen, or rather let me say, than it appears to me possible to give by any other process.

The present Essay, however, I devote to the purpose of removing, or at least invalidating, one objection that I may reasonably anticipate, and which may be conveyed in the following question :-What proof have you of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece? What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic (such I mean, as the republics of ancient Greece were) could not exist?

I know no better way in which I can reply to this objection,