254 ON TH£ GODS OF GREECE, 



veil as the Sun and Moon, are confidered as I fa, or the 

 Ruler, from which word Ifi may be regularly formed; 

 though Ifdnz be the ufual name of his active Power, 

 adored as the Goddefs of Nature. Ml have not yet 

 found in Sanfcrit, the wild, though poetical, tale of Jo ; 

 but am perfuaded, that, by means of the Pur anas, we 

 fliall in time difcover all the learning of the Egyptians, 

 without decyphering their hieroglyphicks. The bull of 

 Ijwara feems to be Apis, or Ap, as he is more corre&ly 

 named in the true reading of a paffage in Jeremiah « 

 and if the veneration fh own, both in Tibet and India, to 

 fo amiable and ufeful a quadruped as the Cow, toge- 

 ther with the regeneration of the Lama himfelf, have 

 not fome affinity with the religion of Egypt, and the 

 idolatry of If rati, we mult at lead allow that circum- 

 ftances have wonderfully coincided. 



Bh avail i now demands our attention ; and in this 

 character I fuppofe the wife of Mahadeva to be as 

 veil the Juno Cinxia, or Lucina, of the Romans (called 

 alfo by them Diana Solvizcna, and by the Greeks, Ilh- 

 thyiajas Venus herfelf: not the Italian Queen of Laugh- 

 ter and jollity, who. with her Nymphs and Graces, was 

 the beautiful child of poetical imagination, and anfwers 

 to the Indian Rembha,w\\\\ herceleftial train of Apfaras, 

 or damfels of paradife ; but Venus Urania, fo luxuri- 

 antly painted by Lucretius, and fo properly invoked by 

 him at the opening of a poem on nature : Venus pre- 

 fiding over generation, and, on that account, exhibited 

 fometimes of both fexes, (an union very common in 

 the Indian fculptures,) as in her bearded flatue at Rome, 

 in the images perhaps called Hermathena, and in thofe 

 figures of her which had the form of a conical marble • 

 ^ for the reafon of which figure we are left (fays Tacitus) 

 " in the dark." The reafon appears too clearly in the 

 temples and paintings of Hindufan; where it never 

 feems to fcive entered the heads of the legiflators or 



people^ 



