In fact, all historians agree with Philostratus and admit that commercial intercourse did exist between Egypt and India. Nay more, Eusebius asserts that in the reign of Memnon, king of Ethiopia, a body of Ethiopians from the countries about the Indus river migrated and settled in the valley of the Nile. And the many Chinese bottles, with inscriptions in that language, found in the tombs of Thebes, prove, beyond the least doubt, that communications have existed between the inhabitants of China and the Egyptians in times very remote, as is conjectured from the inferior quality of the bottles, that some seem to believe were manufactured before the art of making objects of porcelain reached the high degree of perfection to which it attained afterward.
On the other hand, the vase with Chinese inscriptions found by Dr. Schliemann in the lowest stratum of his excavations at Hissarlik, inscriptions that were partly deciphered by the eminent indianist Mr. Emile Burnouf and afterward thoroughly interpreted by the great Chinese scholar Fi-Fangpao, when ambassador at Berlin, and proved to mention the fact of the vase having contained samples of Chinese gauze, shows that active commercial intercourse was carried on by the Chinese with Greece and Asia Minor even before the siege of Troy.
These conceptions concerning the Triune God have come down through the vista of ages, to the present day, preserved in the works of the philosophers, and are still held sacred by many among Christians and Brahmins. But we do not learn from their sacred books where, when or how said doctrine originated. Whatever may have been the source from which it sprang, it is certain that the priests and learned men of Egypt, Chaldea, India, or China, if they still knew the true history of its origin at the time they wrote, kept it a profound secret, and imparted it only to a few select among those initiated in the sacred mysteries.
We need not seek for information among the fathers of the Christian Church, for they are as silent as the tomb on the subject. They admitted into their tenets the notion of a Triune God as taught by the pagan philosophers, and appropriated it, as they have many other of their teachings and theories, without knowing, without inquiring, concerning their origin. The councils pronounced them revelations from on high; unfathomable mysteries not to be investigated; and imposed them as dogmas, to be implicitly believed, with blind faith, as they are to-day, by the followers of the Romish Church. Through their adherents the idea of the three persons in the Godhead has found its way into Free Masonry, and on the columns that adorn the temple, in the working of one of the degrees, we read these inscriptions: "In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity;" and further down, "We have the happiness to dwell in the pacific unity of the sacred numbers."
To those initiated to the lesser mysteries the doctrine was presented under the garb of the complicated metaphysical speculations with which it has reached us. Such explanations of the symbolical nature of the mystic numbers were given to them so as to make it well-nigh impossible to obtain a fair understanding of their purport. By the perusal of the extracts just quoted it is easy to see that all the reasonings concerning the mystic value of number 3 and its relations to a Supreme Deity are mere fancies of the imagination, vague speculations, fallacious cavils; meaningless for practical and inquiring minds. So far as explaining the nature of the Deity all philosophers agree in admitting that it transcends the intelligence of man since man is finite; and what is finite will never be able to comprehend that which is infinite.
Some of the Greek philosophers reflected in their teachings, as well as in their writings, the doctrines they had learned from their teachers, the priests of Heliopolis, Memphis and Thebes. From them we may gather a glimmer of dim light pointing toward the origin of the symbolization of the numbers. We have said that Proclus asserts that the three component parts of the triple deity were three intellects or three Kings—a fact corroborated by Plato, who also had been admitted to the mysteries, and by Orpheus, who celebrated these three Kings, in the ceremonies instituted by him, that Herodotus says were identical with the Egyptian mysteries.
Pythagoras, who had received his knowledge of the numbers and their meaning from the Egyptians, taught his disciples that God was number and harmony. He caused them to honor numbers and geometrical diagrams with the names of the gods. The Egyptians likened nature to the equilateral triangle, the most perfect and beautiful of all triangles; and according to Servius, assigned the perfect number 3 to the great God.
The Chaldees symbolized the Eusoph or great light, by an equilateral triangle; and in the Sri-Santara or cosmogonical diagram of the Hindoos, which has served as model for many of their temples, the nameless, the great Aum that dwells in the infinite, is figured as an equilateral triangle. The Egyptians held the equilateral triangle as the symbol of "Nature" beautiful and fruitful. In the hieroglyphs it was the emblem of worship. We see, over the main altar, in all the ancient Catholic churches, the representation of an equilateral triangle containing the all-seeing eye of Osiris, as symbol of Deity. The same emblem is familiar also to those who visit masonic lodges as one under which is figured the "Great Architect of the Universe."
If from those countries that we have been accustomed to consider as the "Old World," and guided by the three words of dismissal used by the Brahmins, and the officiating priests of Eleusis, at the closing of their religious ceremonies, words we have shown to belong to the Maya language, we carry our inquiries into the "Lands of the West," there again we will find that the triangle was also symbolical among the Mayas and their neighbors.
We see it in the position of the three semispheres carved, as already said, at each end of the northern chamber of the building above the sanctuary at Uxmal. We next meet with it in the triangular arches that form the ceilings of the apartments in all the temples and palaces, in fact in all the edifices of Mayax, as well as in those of Palenque and other localities of Central America.