Another axiom of his is, that the Deluge must have really happened, because that the tradition of it is universal! To this, also, I chime in my affirmative response, and proclaim, yea. But the tradition of the tree of knowledge is equally universal. And though the ground work of both occurred, and was substantively true, yet was the description of neither more than a graceful allegory; while the salutary alarm imparted under this guise, and the monitory lesson suggested by its horrors, in amusing the fancy, edified it, at the same moment, by keeping before it a picture of that spiritual desolation, which sin leaves in the citadel of the soul.[306]
“Moses,” says the apostle, “was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.”[307]
Now Strabo assures us that the Egyptians of his day were as ignorant as he was himself of the origin of their religion, of the import of their symbols, and of their national history. They pretended to retain some evanescent traces thereof in the time of Diodorus; but so scrupulously exact were they in the concealment of their tenour, that to pry into them, profanely, was morally impossible.
Herodotus himself, who neglected no channel of information, found it no easy matter to glean a few initiatory scraps from them. And even these were accompanied with such solemn denunciations, that his embarrassment is betrayed when but alluding to their tendency.
If, during Moses’s residence at Pharaoh’s Court, his opportunities of insight were greater, it is still self-evident that the accomplishments which he obtained were more of a secular character than of a religious cast—that the courtier was the first object of the young princess’s directions, and the qualifications of the statesman her next ambition for her charge. The mysteries of the priests were too awful, and too sanctified, to be debased to the routine of a schoolboy’s rehearsal; and even when ripening age did bespeak a more chastened mind, the communication of their contents was obscured by the interposition of an almost impenetrable umbrage.
Thus palliated by types, Moses did, however, imbibe from the Egyptians all the knowledge which they then possessed of the nature of their ceremonies; and the record of the Fall, the Deluge, and the Creation are the direct transcripts of the instruction so conveyed. But though it is undeniable, from their symbols, that the Egyptians must have been well apprised of the constitution of those rites, yet am I as satisfied as I am of my physical motion, that the foldings of that web, in which they were so mystically doubled, was lost to their grasp in the labyrinths of antiquity.
Moses, therefore, could not have learned from the Egyptians more than the Egyptians themselves had known. He related the allegory as he had received it from them: and it is, doubtless, to his ignorance of its ambiguous interpretation, accessible only through that language in which it was originally involved, that we are indebted for a transmission, so essentially Irish.
The Pish-de-danaan dynasty which rose upon the ruins of the Tuath-de-danaans, in Iran, was itself, in after ages, ejected from that country. Egypt was the retreat of their shattered fortunes; and there, during their abode, under the name of the Shepherd-kings, they erected the Pyramids, in honour of Pith, or Padma-devi, but at an age long anterior to what may be presumed from Manetho.[308]
Previously, however, to their arrival in Egypt, Shinaar in Mesopotamia afforded them an asylum. Here it was that Nimrod broke in:[309] and as I have before but transiently glanced at that circumstance, I shall now revert to it with more precision.
Between the tenets of the Pish-de-danaans and those of their Tuath-de-danaan predecessors, there was but a single point of dissentient belief. The language, the customs, the manners and modes of life of both were the same. To all intents and purposes they were one identical people.