“ He supposes that the beginning of things was a dark and windy air, or 
a breeze of thick air, and a turbid chaos resembling Erebus, and that these 
were unbounded, and for a series of ages had no limit. But when the wind 
became enamoured of its own first principles, and an intimate union took 
place, that connexion was called Pothos, and this was the beginning of the 
creation of all things. And from this sprung all the seed of the creation, 
and the generation of the universe.” 
By a wonderful succession of developments, the universe 
grew into shape. The text is too tedious to be quoted at 
length. It tells of certain animals without sensation; then 
intelligent animals formed in the shape of an egg ; then the 
sun, the moon, greater stars, lesser stars ; then light, winds, 
clouds, torrents of waters. At length thunders and lightnings 
startled the intelligent animals into motion in earth and sea. 
At this point there is an allusion to the books of Taautus, 
Thot, or Hermes, showing that the whole fiction must have 
been made up out of Egyptian absurdities. Then come forth 
men , who worship the productions of the earth, and call them 
gods. Now the wind Colpias and his wife produced two 
mortal men, one of whom discovered food from trees. Their 
descendants worshiped the sun, and now began the genera- 
tions of mankind. Long ages of silent mystery are supposed 
to follow, and tardy invention of but the rudest art. After all, 
partially-developed mankind began to bear some features of 
humanity. A man called Elydn, or most high , had a son 
called Heaven and a daughter called Earth, and after these 
the heaven and the earth received their names ; but the most 
high father of the living Heaven and Earth lost his life in a 
combat with wild beasts, and was afterwards worshipped by 
the Phoenicians. To him, or to his name, I may presently 
refer. (See Kenrick's Phoenicia, p. 330.) 
Meanwhile, seeing what Phoenicia, and perhaps Greece and 
Rome too, received from Egypt, and having been invited to 
expect that light from Egypt may be thrown upon truths first 
revealed in the Old Testament, and possibly on Christianity 
also, it may be well to know how far the sages of Egypt itself 
advanced upon the wisdom of their fathers in speculation on 
the being of a God; and thence we may judge how far they 
were at any time capable of enriching the mind of writers of 
Holy Scripture on the awfully sublime subject of the Divino 
Nature. Porphyry, a notorious assailant of Christianity in 
the third century, also assailed the superstition of Egypt, and 
Jamblicus, a clever Egyptian, resident in Syria, undertook to 
answer him. The parts of his work on mysteries which relate 
