“φουδ εξ ου τρωρλοδιται.”—Syncellus, p. 47.
“Fut was the founder of the nations in Libya (Africa), and the people were from him called Futi” (Josephus, Ant. lib. i. c. 7).
[114] Vide Plutarch, de Isi et Osiri.
[115] Eas, in Irish, also means the moon.
[116] Literally the Son of the Sun, and should properly be written O’Siris, like any of our Irish names, such as O’Brien—and meaning sprung from.
[117] These are the indexes for which Mr. O’Connor could find no other use than that of dials!
[118] “Les mystères de l’antiquité nous sont demeurés presqu’interdicts; les vestiges de ses monuments manquent le plus souvent de sens pour nous, parceque, de siècle en siècle, les savants ont voulu leur attribuer un sens” (De Sacy).
[119] To this declaration of Mr. Heeren, as I cannot now bestow upon it a separate inquiry, I must be allowed briefly to intimate that if such be all that he “knows with certainty” on the topic, he had better not know it at all, for, with the exception of that part which avows the general ignorance concerning its rise and progress, as well as its expulsion by the Brahmins from the East, all the rest is inaccurate. In the first place it does not “flourish” at present in Ceylon. It has sunk and degenerated there into an unmeaning tissue of hideous demonology, if we may judge by a reference to a large work published here some time ago, by Mr. Upham, which is as opposite from real Budhism as truth is from falsehood. In the second place its tenets were not “in direct opposition to those of the Brahmins,” any more than those of the Catholics are from the tenets of the Protestants; yet have the latter contrived to oust the Catholics, their predecessors, as the Brahmins did the still more antecedent Budhists. And this will be sufficient to neutralise that insinuation which would imply that Budha was an innovator and a sectarian, until I show by and by that the reverse was the fact.
[120] The Jews themselves, so early as the time of Moses, adopted the practice as an act of thanksgiving.
“And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her, with timbrels, and with dances.