or this purpose, sometimes by men credulous themselves
and dupes of their own visions, and sometimes by bold and energetic
spirits in pursuit of great objects of ambition.

IX. Religion of Moses, or Worship of the Soul of the World (You-piter).

"Such was the legislator of the Hebrews; who, wishing to separate his
nation from all others, and to form a distinct and solitary empire,
conceived the design of establishing its basis on religious prejudices,
and of raising around it a sacred rampart of opinions and of rites. But
in vain did he prescribe the worship of the symbols which prevailed in
lower Egypt and in Phoenicia;* for his god was nevertheless an Egyptian
god, invented by those priests of whom Moses had been the disciple; and
Yahouh,** betrayed by its very name, essence (of beings), and by its
symbol, the burning bush, is only the soul of the world, the
moving principle which the Greeks soon after adopted under the same
denomination in their you-piter, regenerating being, and under that of
Ei, existence,*** which the Thebans consecrated by the name of Kneph,
which Sais worshipped under the emblem of Isis veiled, with this
inscription: I am al that has been, all that is, and all that is to
come, and no mortal has raised my veil; which Pythagoras honored under
the name of Vesta, and which the stoic philosophy defined precisely by
calling it the principle of fire. In vain did Moses wish to blot from
his religion every thing which had relation to the stars; many traits
call them to mind in spite of all he has done. The seven planetary
luminaries of the great candlestick; the twelve stones, or signs in the
Urim of the high priests; the feast of the two equinoxes, (entrances and
gates of the two hemispheres); the ceremony of the lamb, (the celestial
ram then in his fifteenth degree); lastly, the name even of Osiris
preserved in his song,**** and the ark, or coffer, an imitation of the
tomb in which that God was laid, all remain as so many witnesses of the
filiation of his ideas, and of their extraction from the common source.

* "At a certain period," says Plutarch (de Iside) "all the
Egyptians have their animal gods painted. The Thebans are
the only people who do not employ painters, because they
worship a god whose form comes not under the senses, and
cannot be represented." And this is the god whom Moses,
educated at Heliopolis, adopted; but the idea was not of his
inventio