diffused.[5] "It seems," says the learned Owen, "to have had its rise
from some broken traditions conveyed by the patriarchs touching the
dominion of the sun by day and of the moon by night." The mode in which
this old system has been modified and spiritually symbolized by
Freemasonry will be the subject of future consideration.

But Sabianism, while it was the most ancient of the religious corruptions,
was, I have said, also the most generally diffused; and hence, even among
nations which afterwards adopted the polytheistic creed of deified men and
factitious gods, this ancient sun-worship is seen to be continually
exerting its influences. Thus, among the Greeks, the most refined people
that cultivated hero-worship, Hercules was the sun, and the mythologic
fable of his destroying with his arrows the many-headed hydra of the
Lernaean marshes was but an allegory to denote the dissipation of paludal
malaria by the purifying rays of the orb of day. Among the Egyptians, too,
the chief deity, Osiris, was but another name for the sun, while his
arch-enemy and destroyer, Typhon, was the typification of night, or
darkness. And lastly, among the Hindus, the three manifestations of their
supreme deity, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, were symbols of the rising,
meridian, and setting sun.

This early and very general prevalence of the sentiment of sun-worship is
worthy of especial attention on account of the influence that it exercised
over the spurious Freemasonry of antiquity, of which I am soon to speak,
and which is still felt, although modified and Christianized in our modern
system. Many, indeed nearly all, of the masonic symbols of the present day
can only be thoroughly comprehended and properly appreciated by this
reference to sun-worship.

This divine truth, then, of the existence of one Supreme God, the Grand