"Are not these your Osiris and Isis?" asked the prince readily.
"I will first explain," said I, not immediately answering his question, "what we in Phœnicia think of Isis. The priests teach that the identity of the goddess Io, who is worshipped with rites unusually imposing at Byblos, is one with Isis."
"What is your opinion, Sesostris?"
"There is," I answered, "a close resemblance between the rites which relate to the death and revival of Adonis at Byblos, and of your divinity Osiris in Egypt. Indeed the priests at Byblos claim to have the sepulchre of Osiris among them, and maintain that all the rites which are commonly referred to Adonis properly relate to Osiris."
"Then Egypt derives Osiris from Phœnicia?" remarked Remeses, with a slight movement of the brows, and a smile.
"Without doubt," I replied. "In Tyre we call Egypt the daughter of Phœnicia."
"The daughter has out-grown the mother, dear Sesostris. We are proud of our parentage. We bow to Phœnicia as the mistress of letters and queen of the merchants of the earth. But what think the priests of Baalbec of Osiris and Isis?"
"It is the tradition of those haughty priests that they are distinct persons," I replied. "The ceremonies and rites with which they worship these deities are truly magnificent, and are invested with every form of the beautiful and gorgeous. Ours, as I have said, in some points resemble your Egyptian rites in honoring Osiris and Isis; but while you Egyptians, Remeses, adore only an abstract attribute of the deity, we adore the hero and the heroic woman—Adonis and Astarte. We rise not beyond them. We elevate them to the heavens and to the moon, and call them our gods. Truly, in the presence of the sublimer, purer myth which is the element of your faith, O Remeses, I feel that I am not far above the Barbara kings of Southern Africa, who deify each his predecessor. The priests of Isis, when they were in Phœnicia, attempted to elevate our worship; but we are still idolaters, that is, mere men-worshippers. Or, where we do not pay them divine honors, we offer them to the sun, and moon, and stars. I must be initiated, O Remeses, into the profounder intellectual mysteries of your spiritual myth, now that I am in Egypt."
"You shall have your wish gratified. The high priest of On shall receive orders to open to you (what is closed to all strangers) the sacred and mystic rites of our faith."
"I have alluded to the mysteries of the temple at Tyre," I added. "Initiated thereinto, I was taught that religion had a higher object than human heroes, and that in Astarte is worshipped the daughter of Heaven and Light, who is life, and that Adonis, her son by the Earth, signifies Truth. Thus, from heaven spring Light, Life, and Truth. These three, say the mystic books which I studied, constitute the Trinity of God, who consists and subsists only in this undivided Trinity as a unit; not Light alone, not Life alone, nor Truth alone; but One in Three. That these three are not three deities, just as in geometry the three sides and three angles are not three triangles, but one triangle. That in order to bring this mystery to a level with the minds of men, light was symbolized by the sun, life by Astarte, truth by Adonis. In the temple of Bel-Pheor, in Cœle-Syria, the sun itself is worshipped as light, life, and truth in one; his rays representing light, his heat life, his material disk or body truth."