ose ideas of battles and rebellions, which
equally abound in all your mythologies. You see what is meant by white
and black angels, your cherubim and seraphim, with heads of eagles, of
lions, or of bulls; your deus, devils, demons, with horns of goats and
tails of serpents; your thrones and dominions, ranged in seven orders or
gradations, like the seven spheres of the planets; all beings acting the
same parts, and endowed with the same attributes in your Vedas, Bibles,
and Zend-avestas, whether they have for chiefs Ormuzd or Brama, Typhon
or Chiven, Michael or Satan;--whether they appear under the form
of giants with a hundred arms and feet of serpents, or that of gods
metamorphosed into lions, storks, bulls or cats, as they are in the
sacred fables of the Greeks and Egyptians. You perceive the successive
filiation of these ideas, and how, in proportion to their remoteness
from their source, and as the minds of men became refined, their gross
forms have been polished, and rendered less disgusting.

"But in the same manner as you have seen the system of two opposite
principles or gods arise from that of symbols, interwoven into its
texture, your attention shall now be called to a new system which has
grown out of this, and to which this has served in its turn as the basis
and support.

V. Moral and Mystical Worship, or System of a Future State.

"Indeed, when the vulgar heard speak of a new heaven and another world,
they soon gave a body to these fictions; they erected therein a real
theatre of action, and their notions of astronomy and geography served
to strengthen, if not to originate, this illusion.

"On the one hand, the Phoenician navigators who passed the pillars of
Hercules, to fetch the tin of Thule and the amber of the Baltic,
related that at the extremity of the world, the end of the ocean (the
Mediterranean), where the sun sets for the countries of Asia, were the
Fortunate Islands, the abode of eternal spring; and beyond were the
hyperborean regions, placed under the earth (relatively to the tropics)
where reigned an eternal night.* From these stories, misunderstood, and
no doubt confusedly related, the imagination of the people composed the
Elysian fields,** regions of delight, placed in a world below, having
their heaven, their sun, and their stars; and Tartarus, a place of
darkness, humidity, mire, and frost. Now, as man, inquisitive of that
which he knows not, and desirous of protracting his existe