, we
should find in it a complete explanation of their
hieroglyphics, for every article forms one.

** If it was for this reason the Persians always wrote the
name of Ahrimanes inverted thus: ['Ahrimanes' upside down
and backwards].

*** Typhon, pronounced Touphon by the Greeks, is precisely
the touphan of the Arabs, which signifies deluge; and these
deluges in mythology are nothing more than winter and the
rains, or the overflowing of the Nile: as their pretended
fires which are to destroy the world, are simply the summer
season. And it is for this reason that Aristotle (De
Meteor, lib. I. c. xiv), says, that the winter of the great
cyclic year is a deluge; and its summer a conflagration.
"The Egyptians," says Porphyry, "employ every year a
talisman in remembrance of the world: at the summer solstice
they mark their houses, flocks and trees with red, supposing
that on that day the whole world had been set on fire. It
was also at the same period that they celebrated the pyrric
or fire dance." And this illustrates the origin of
purification by fire and by water; for having denominated
the tropic of Cancer the gate of heaven, and the genial heat
of celestial fire, and that of Capricorn the gate of deluge
or of water, it was imagined that the spirit or souls who
passed through these gates in their way to and from heaven,
were roasted or bathed: hence the baptism of Mithra; and the
passage through flames, observed throughout the East long
before Moses.

**** That is when the ram became the equinoctial sign, or
rather when the alteration of the skies showed that it was
no longer the bull.

"In Syria, it was the hog or wild boar, enemy of Adonis; because in that
country the functions of the Northern Bear were performed by the animal
whose inclination for mire and dirt was emblematic of winter. And this
is the reason, followers of Moses and Mahomet! that you hold him in
horror, in imitation of the priests of Memphis and Balbec, who detested
him as the murderer of their God, the sun. This likewise, O Indians!
is the type of your Chib-en; and it has been likewise the Pluto of your
brethren, the Romans and Greeks; in like manner, your Brama, God the
creator, is only the Persian Ormuzd, and the Egyptian Osiris, whose
very name expresses creative power, producer of forms. An