as it was, of the Grecian people--and becoming among all the deities
of the heathen heaven what the Athens she protected became upon the
earth.

XI. It may be said of the Greeks, that there never was a people who
so completely nationalized all that they borrowed from a foreign
source. And whatever, whether in a remoter or more recent age, it
might have appropriated from the creed of Isis and Osiris, one cause
alone would have sufficed to efface from the Grecian the peculiar
character of the Egyptian mythology.

The religion of Egypt, as a science, was symbolical--it denoted
elementary principles of philosophy; its gods were enigmas. It has
been asserted (on very insufficient data) that in the earliest ages of
the world, one god, of whom the sun was either the emblem or the
actual object of worship, was adored universally throughout the East,
and that polytheism was created by personifying the properties and
attributes of the single deity: "there being one God," says Aristotle,
finely, "called by many names, from the various effects which his
various power produces." [30] But I am far from believing that a
symbolical religion is ever the earliest author of polytheism; for a
symbolical religion belongs to a later period of civilization, when
some men are set apart in indolence to cultivate their imagination, in
order to beguile or to instruct the reason of the rest. Priests are
the first philosophers--a symbolical religion the first philosophy.
But faith precedes philosophy. I doubt not, therefore, that
polytheism existed in the East before that age when the priests of
Chaldea and of Egypt invested it with a sublimer character by
summoning to the aid of invention a wild and speculative wisdom--by
representing under corporeal tokens the revolutions of the earth, the