Thoth (p. 31, line 12), is the Recording Angel of Judgment; and the Greek Hermes—­Phre (line 16), is the Sun.

Neith is the Egyptian spirit of divine wisdom, and the Athena of the Greeks.  No sufficient statement of her many attributes, still less of their meanings, can be shortly given; but this should be noted respecting the veiling of the Egyptian image of her by vulture wings—­that as she is, physically, the goddess of the air, this bird, the most powerful creature of the air known to the Egyptians, naturally became her symbol.  It had other significations; but certainly this, when in connection with Neith.  As representing her, it was the most important sign, next to the winged sphere, in Egyptian sculpture; and, just as in Homer, Athena herself guides her heroes into battle, this symbol of wisdom, giving victory, floats over the heads of the Egyptian Kings.  The Greeks, representing the goddess herself in human form, yet would not lose the power of the Egyptian symbol, and changed it into an angel of victory.  First seen in loveliness on the early coins of Syracuse and Leontium, it gradually became the received sign of all conquest, and the so called “Victory” of later times, which, little by little, loses its truth, and is accepted by the moderns only as a personification of victory itself,—­not as an actual picture of the living Angel who led to victory.  There is a wide difference between these two conceptions,—­all the difference between insincere poetry, and sincere religion.  This I have also endeavored farther to illustrate in the tenth Lecture, there is however one part of Athena’s character which it would have been irrelevant to dwell upon there, yet which I must not wholly leave unnoticed.

As the goddess of the air, she physically represents both its beneficent calm, and necessary tempest other storm deities (as Chrysaor and Aeolus) being invested with a subordinate and more or less malignant function, which is exclusively their own, and is related to that of Athena as the power of Mars is related to hers in war.  So also Virgil makes her able to wield the lightning herself, while Juno cannot, but must pray for the intervention of Aeolus.  She has precisely the correspondent moral authority over calmness of mind, and just anger.  She soothes Achilles, as she incites Tydides; her physical power over the air being always hinted correlatively.  She grasps Achilles by his hair—­as the wind would lift it—­softly,

    “It fanned his cheek, it raised his hair,
    Like a meadow gale in spring”

She does not merely turn the lance of Mars from Diomed; but seizes it in both her hands, and casts it aside, with a sense of making it vain, like chaff in the wind;—­to the shout of Achilles, she adds her own voice of storm in heaven—­but in all cases the moral power is still the principal one—­most beautifully in that seizing of Achilles by the hair, which was the talisman of his life (because he had