Having established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East, where he constructed one hundred and forty cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then returned to Egypt where he became its King.[827]
Thus, he is identified with Hermes. But there were five Hermes—or rather one, who appeared, as did some Manus and Rishis, in several different characters. In the Burham i Kati, he is mentioned as Hormig, a name of the Planet Mercury or Budha; and Wednesday was sacred both to Hermes and Thot.[828] The Hermes of Oriental tradition was worshipped by the Phineatæ, and is said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt, and civilized it under the name of Thoth.[829] But under whichever of these characters, he is always credited with having transferred all the sciences from latent to active potency, i.e., with having been the first to teach Magic to Egypt and to Greece, before the days of Magna Græcia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes.
Not only does Herodotus, the “father of history,” tell us of the marvellous Dynasties of Gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed by the Dynasties of Demi-gods, Heroes, and finally men, but [pg 384] the whole series of classical authors support him. Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato, Manetho, etc., repeat the same story, and never vary in the order given.
As Creuzer shows:
It is, indeed, from the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the gods of light, that wisdom descends to the inferior spheres.... In the system of the ancient priests [Hierophants and Adepts] all things without exception, Gods, Genii, Souls [Manes], the whole world, are conjointly developed in space and duration. The pyramid may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of spirits.[830]
It is the modern historians—French Academicians, like Renan, chiefly—who have made more efforts to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of Divine Kings, than is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could never have been more unwilling than was Eratosthenes (260 b.c.) to accept the unpalatable fact; and yet the latter found himself obliged to recognize its truth. For this, the great Astronomer is treated with much contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho becomes with them “a superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere of other lying priests of Heliopolis.” As the Demonologist De Mirville justly remarks:
All those historians and priests, so veracious when repeating stories of humankings and men, suddenly become extremely suspicious no sooner do they go back to their gods.
But there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the genius of Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of Egypt (of Manetho above all), and of Ptolemy, in the Turin papyrus, the most remarkable of all. In the words of the Egyptologist, De Rougé:
Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his own eyes the remains of a list of Dynasties embracing the furthest mythic times, or the Reigns of the Gods and Heroes.... At the very beginning of this curious papyrus we have to arrive at the conviction that, so far back as even the period of Ramses, these mythic and heroical traditions were just as Manetho had transmitted them to us; we see figuring in them, as Kings of Egypt, the Gods Seb, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thoth-Hermes, and the Goddess Ma, a long period of centuries being assigned to the reign of each of these.[831]
These synchronistic tables, besides the fact that they were disfigured by Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The chronology of the Divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the [pg 385] age of humanity, has ever been in the hands of the priests, and kept secret from the profane multitudes.