forests of Northern Europe; and, with a savagery characteristic of the American aborigines, the sun temples of Mexico streamed with human blood in honor of the beneficent orb.”—­The Castes and Creeds of India, Blackw.  Mag., vol. lxxxi. p. 317.—­“There is no people whose religion is known to us,” says the Abbe Banier, “neither in our own continent nor in that of America, that has not paid the sun a religious worship, if we except some inhabitants of the torrid zone, who are continually cursing the sun for scorching them with his beams.”—­Mythology, lib. iii. ch. iii.—­Macrobius, in his Saturnalia, undertakes to prove that all the gods of Paganism may be reduced to the sun.

[6] “Varro de religionibus loquens, evidenter dicit, multa esse vera, quae vulgo scire non sit utile; multaque, quae tametsi falsa sint, aliter existimare populum expediat.”—­St. AUGUSTINE, De Civil.  Dei.—­We must regret, with the learned Valloisin, that the sixteen books of Varro, on the religious antiquities of the ancients, have been lost; and the regret is enhanced by the reflection that they existed until the beginning of the fourteenth century, and disappeared only when their preservation for less than two centuries more would, by the discovery of printing, have secured their perpetuity.

[7] Strabo, Geog., lib. i.

[8] Maurice, Indian Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 297.

[9] Div.  Leg., vol. i. b. ii.  Sec. iv. p. 193, 10th Lond. edit.

[10] The hidden doctrines of the unity of the Deity and the immortality of the soul were taught originally in all the Mysteries, even those of Cupid and Bacchus.—­WARBURTON, apud Spence’s Anecdotes, p. 309.

[11] Isoc.  Paneg., p. 59.

[12] Apud Arrian.  Dissert., lib. iii. c. xxi.

[13] Phaedo.

[14] Dissert. on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, in the Pamphleteer, vol. viii. p. 53.

[15] Symbol. und Mythol. der Alt.  Voelk.

[16] In these Mysteries, after the people had for a long time bewailed the loss of a particular person, he was at last supposed to be restored to life.—­BRYANT, Anal. of Anc.  Mythology, vol. iii. p. 176.

[17] Herod.  Hist., lib. iii. c. clxxi.

[18] The legend says it was cut into fourteen pieces.  Compare this with the fourteen days of burial in the masonic legend of the third degree.  Why the particular number in each?  It has been thought by some, that in the latter legend there was a reference to the half of the moon’s age, or its dark period, symbolic of the darkness of death, followed by the fourteen days of bright moon, or restoration to life.

[19] Mysteres du Paganisme, tom. i. p. 6.

[20] Notes to Rawlinson’s Herodotus, b. ii. ch. clxxi.  Mr. Bryant expresses the same opinion:  “The principal rites in Egypt were confessedly for a person lost and consigned for a time to darkness, who was at last found.  This person I have mentioned to have been described under the character of Osiris.”—­Analysis of Ancient Mythology, vol. iii. p. 177.