M. Sonnerat also gives a passage from a Sanscrit Pooraun,[1] in which it is stated that it is God alone who created the universe by his productive power, who maintains it by his all-preserving power, and who will destroy it by his destructive power, and that it is this God who is represented under the name of three Gods, who are called Trimourti.[2] Mr. Forster[3] says, “One circumstance which forcibly struck my attention was the Hindoo belief of a Trinity; the persons are Sree Mun Narrain, the Maha Letchimy, a beautiful woman, and a Serpent. These persons are by the Hindoos supposed to be wholly indivisible; the one is three, and the three are one.” Mr. Maurice then states that the Sree Mun Narrain, as Mr. Forster writes it, is Narayen the Supreme God: the beautiful woman is the Imma of the Hebrews, and that the union of the sexes is perfectly consistent with that ancient doctrine maintained in the Geeta, and propagated by Orpheus, that the Deity is both male and female.[4]
Mr. Maurice, in his Indian Antiquities, says, “This notion of three persons in the Deity was diffused amongst all the nations of the earth, established at once in regions so distant as Japan and Peru, immemorially acknowledged throughout the whole extent of Egypt and India, and flourishing with equal vigour amidst the snowy mountains of Thibet, and the vast deserts of Siberia.”
CHAPTER III.
ISRAEL WORSLEY’S ACCOUNT OF ANCIENT TRINITIES.—OPINION OF DR. PRITCHARD AND OTHERS ON THE TRINITIES.—OPINION OF MAURICE AND OTHERS ON THE TRINITIES.— THE CHRISTIAN TRINITY—ITS ORIGIN.—MACROBIUS ON THE TRINITY.—PHILO’S TRINITY OF THE JEWS.—FABER’S ACCOUNT OF THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF OF THE TRINITY.—OBSERVATIONS ON THE DOCTRINE THAT DESTRUCTION IS ONLY REGENERATION.
1. Mr. Worsley says, “This doctrine was of very great antiquity, and generally received by all the Gothic and Celtic nations. These philosophers taught, that the Supreme God, Teut or Woden, was the active principle, the soul of the world, which, uniting itself to matter, had thereby put it into a condition to produce intelligences or inferior gods and men. This the poets express by saying that Odin espoused Frea, or the Lady, by way of eminence. Yet they allowed a great difference between these two principles. The Supreme was eternal, whereas matter was his work, and of course had a beginning. All this was expressed by the phrase, Earth is the daughter and wife of the universal Father. From this mystical union was born the God Thor-Asa Thor, the Lord Thor. He was the firstborn of the Supreme, the greatest of the intelligences, that were born of the union of the two principles. The characters given him correspond much with those which the Romans gave to their Jupiter. He, too, was the thunderer, and to him was devoted the fifth day, Thor’s-dag; in German and Dutch, Donder dag,
Q 2
