[234] “Hercules was known as the king of the Musians,” says Schwab, ii., 44; and Musien was the feast of “Spirit and Matter,” Adonis and Venus, Bacchus and Ceres. (See Dunlap: “Mystery of Adonis,” p. 95.) Dunlap shows, on the authority of Julian and Anthon (67), Æsculapius, “the Savior of all,” identical with Phtha (the creative Intellect, the Divine Wisdom), and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis, and Hercules (ibid., p. 93), and Phtha is the “Anima mundi,” the Universal Soul, of Plato, the Holy Ghost of the Egyptians, and the Astral Light of the Kabalists. M. Michelet, however, regards the Grecian Herakles as a different character, the adversary of the Bacchic revellings and their attendant human sacrifices.
[235] Plato: “Ion” (Burgess), vol. iv., p. 294.
[236] “Attic.” i., xiv.
[237] Plato: “Theages.” Cicero renders this word δαιμονιον, quiddam divinum, a divine something, not anything personal.
[238] “Cratylus,” p. 79.
[239] “Arnobius,” vi., xii.
[240] As we will show in subsequent chapters, the sun was not considered by the ancients as the direct cause of the light and heat, but only as an agent of the former, through which the light passes on its way to our sphere. Thus it was always called by the Egyptians “the eye of Osiris,” who was himself the Logos, the First-begotten, or light made manifest to the world, “which is the mind and divine intellect of the Concealed.” It is only that light of which we are cognizant that is the Demiurge, the creator of our planet and everything pertaining to it; with the invisible and unknown universes disseminated through space, none of the sun-gods had anything to do. The idea is expressed very clearly in the “Books of Hermes.”
[241] “Orphic Hymn,” xii.; Hermann; Dunlap: “Musah, His Mysteries,” p. 91.
[242] Movers, 525. Dunlap: “Mysteries of Adonis,” 94.
[243] Preller: ii., 153. This is evidently the origin of the Christian dogma of Christ descending into hell and overcoming Satan.