And if Ægyptian Philosophy may obtain, the scale of influences was thus disposed, and the geniall spirits of both worlds, do trace their way in ascending and descending Pyramids, mystically apprehended in the Letter X, and the open Bill and stradling Legges of a Stork, which was imitated by that Character.
Of this Figure Plato made choice to illustrate the motion of the soul, both of the world and man; while he delivered that God divided the whole conjunction length-wise, according to figure of a Greek X, and then turning it about reflected it into a circle; By the circle implying the uniform motion of the first Orb, and by the right lines, the planetical and various motions within it. And this also with application unto the soul of man, which hath a double aspect, one right, whereby it beholdeth the body, and objects without; another circular and reciprocal, whereby it beholdeth it self. The circle declaring the motion of the indivisible soul, simple, according to the divinity of its nature, and returning into it self; the right lines respecting the motion pertaining unto sense, and vegetation, and the central decussation, the wonderous connexion of the severall faculties conjointly in one substance. And so conjoyned the unity and duality of the soul, and made out the three substances so much considered by him; That is, the indivisible or divine, the divisible or corporeal, and that third, which was the Systasis or harmony of those two, in the mystical decussation.
And if that were clearly made out which Justin Martyr took for granted, this figure hath had the honour to characterise and notifie our blessed Saviour, as he delivereth in that borrowed expression from Plato: Decussavit eum in universo, the hint whereof he would have Plato derive from the figure of the brazen Serpent, and to have mistaken the Letter X for T, whereas it is not improbable, he learned these and other mystical expressions in his Learned Observations of Ægypt, where he might obviously behold the Mercurial characters, the handed crosses, and other mysteries not throughly understood in the sacred Letter X, which being derivative from the Stork, one of the ten sacred animals, might be originally Ægyptian, and brought into Greece by Cadmus of that Countrey.
Footnotes
[163] Quantum vertice ad auras Æthereas, tantum radice ad tartara tendit.
[164] Galen. de med. secundum loc.
[165] Hedera formosior alba.
[166] Lux orco, tenebræ Jovi, tenebræ orco, lux Jovi. Hippocr. de diæta.
[167] S. Hevelii Selenographia.
[168] Car. Bovillus de intellectu.