Mysticism and its Results: Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy. John Delafield

on Pharaoh and on all his people, and on all his servants, and covered the land of Egypt, we learn "the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the land of Egypt."^[23] If the ancient Egyptians were like their descendants, it is singular the magi could not accomplish the next plague, that is, of lice. But here their power ended. The magi originated in Media. According to oriental custom, to them was intrusted the preservation of scientific knowledge, and the performance of the holy exercises of Religion. Afterward, in a special sense, the magi were a caste of priests of the Medes and Persians, deriving the name of Pehlvi; Mag, or Mog, generally signifies in that language, a priest. They are expressly mentioned by Herodotus as a Median tribe. Zoroaster was not their founder, but was their reformer, and the purifier of their doctrines. The Magi of his time were opposed to his innovations; and they, therefore, were condemned by him. When afterward, however, they adopted his reforms, he effected their thorough organization, dividing them into Apprentices, Masters, and Perfect Masters. Their study and science consisted in observation of their holy rites, in the knowledge of their sacred forms of prayer, and liturgies by which Ormuzd was worshipped, and in the ceremonies attendant on their prayers and sacrifices. They only were permitted to act as mediators between God and man. To them alone was the will of God declared. They only could penetrate the future. And they alone predicted the future to those who sought of them therefor. In later days the name Magi became synonymous with sorcerer, magician, alchemist, &c.^[24]

      The magi of Egypt were the priests, the founders and preservers of the mysteries of the secret grades of instruction, and of the hieratic and hieroglyphic writings and sculptures. In secret they were the priesthood. In public, in religious matters, the same. But in public secular affairs they seem to be recognised as Magi.

      When mythology was invented, most of the gods, if not all of them, were received as symbolical, physical beings, the poets made of them moral agents; and as such they appear in the religions of the people of earlier days. The symbolical meaning would have been lost, if no means had been provided to insure its preservation. The MYSTERIES, it seems, afforded such means. Their great end, therefore, was to preserve the knowledge of the peculiar attributes of those divinities which had been incorparated into the popular religion under new forms; what powers and objects of nature they represented; how these, and how the universe came into being; in a word, cosmogonies, like those contained in the Orphic instructions. But this knowledge, though it was preserved by oral instruction, was perpetuated no less by symbolic representations and usages; which, at least in part, consisted of sacred traditions and fables. "In the sanctuary of Sais," says Herodotus (l.c.), "representations are given by night of the adventures of the goddess; and these are called by the Egyptians mysteries; of which, however, I will relate no more. It was thence that these mysteries were introduced into Greece."^[25] The temples of India and of Egypt seem to be identical in architecture and in sculpture.^[26] Both nations seem to have sprung from the old Assyrian stock.^[27] The magi of both countries appear to have had a common origin; and their teachings must have been, therefore, traditionally the same. We may, then, presume that there were three grades in the instructions of these mysteries, by whatever name they may have been called—whether Apprentices, Masters, and Perfect Masters, or otherwise; that they were sacred in their character; and that their symbolic meanings were revealed in these Mysteries, and in no other manner, while they were kept a secret from the world at large. But this was not all. They spread, with emigration and commerce, into all then known countries. Their common origin, or at least that of most of them, is still perceptible. Ceres had long wandered over the earth, before she was received at Eleusis, and erected there her sanctuary. (Isocrat. Paneg. op., p. 46, ed. Steph., and many other places in Meursii Eleusin., cap. 1.) Her secret service in the Thesmophoria, according to the account of Herodotus (iv. 172), was first introduced by Danaus; who brought it from Egypt to the Peloponnesus.^[28] One writer says that mysteries were, among the Greeks, and afterward also among the Romans, secret religious assemblies, which no uninitiated person was permitted to approach. They originated at a very early period. They were designed to interpret those mythological fables and religious rites, the true meaning of which it was thought expedient to conceal from the people. They were perhaps necessary in those times, in which the superstitions, the errors, and the prejudices of the people, could not be openly exposed without danger to the public peace. Upon this ground they were tolerated and protected by the state. Their first and fundamental law was a profound secrecy. In all mysteries there were dramatic exhibitions, relating to the exploits of the deities in whose honor they were celebrated.^[29] We may thus trace all ancient pagan religion to a common origin, with similarity of human means to accomplish a general result, variant in name, or in practice, as to the deity, or form of its worship, but resting on a unity as to its commencement and its object.

      We can hardly penetrate the veil which hides from us the pagan worship of that early human stock the race of Ham, which—without the divine light granted only to the Israelites—was the origin of false worship. We can only arrive at conclusions, but these are the result of strong presumptions arising from undisputed historical facts. What are they?

      One of the principal chiefs of the earliest race, whence came the magi, &c., was Nimrod, afterward deified by the name of Bel to the Chaldeans, Baal to the Hebrews, Βηλος to the Greeks, and Belus to the Romans; and when, in later days, statues received adoration (which at first was only accorded to the being of whom the statue was a type), he became worshipped under a multiplication of statues, they were in the Hebrew language called "Baalim," or the plural of Baal. Nimrod was the son of Cush, grandson of Ham, and great-grandson of Noah. "And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, 'Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.' And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. And out of that land he went forth to Assyria, and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah: the same is a great city."^[30] While, then, the children of Shem and Japheth pursued the patriarchal course, and preserved the ancient traditions subsequently handed down, the descendants of Ham, suffering under the patriarchal malediction of Noah, built cities composed of families, and a great kingdom composed of cities and nations. This kingdom was the origin of pagan worship. They lost the patriarchal traditions, and were the first to establish on this earth the concentration of power in a political system. That power once attained, the daring energy of the king became in the hand of the priesthood a subject of deification for two reasons. 1. The king was mortal, and must die. 2. The power must be preserved. When afterward, under Peleg, this race, at their building of Ba-Bel—their temple of Bel—became dispersed, and left to us only their ruin of that temple, now called Birs Nimroud, the magi, or priests, preserved the power he attained to themselves, by means of secrecy in their mysteries, and which were dispersed subsequently through the earth in different languages and forms, varying with the poetry and climate of the country or countries thereafter occupied, and adapted from time to time to the existing exigencies of the times. Thence sprang the origin of mythologies, or, in other words, fabulous histories of the fructifying energies of Nature, whether developed in the germination of the vegetable kingdom, or in an occasional poetical version of some heroic act of one in power.

      This nation, the old Assyrian, became dispersed at the destruction of their great temple. But their political power everywhere was mysteriously preserved. When the magi became organized in Media, they spread in every direction. From earliest days we find their worship amid the nations conquered by Joshua. We see them in the traces of the Οἰ Ποιμενες, or shepherd-kings of Egypt, and in the sorcerers of the days of Moses. We, find them reformed by Zoroaster in Persia. They are conspicuous among the Greeks, who derived their mysteries from Egypt; and in the worship of Isis at Rome, never indigenous there. And even in later days (those of Darius, Belshazzar, and Cyrus), they seem to be thoroughly re-established in their original birthplace. And, strange as it may appear, we find their power over kings, generals, nations, and people, in the hands of the priesthood, by means of their mysteries, from all early history, until affected by the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

      Regarding, then, the off-shoot from patriarchal tradition to be the origin of pagan worship; referring also to the first formation of cities, and of one immense kingdom, by the descendants of Ham (accursed