"that the light beheld in the mysteries, was nothing more than an illuminated image which the priests had thoroughly purified."
But he is likewise no less mistaken, in transferring the injunction given in one of the magic oracles of Zoroaster, to the business of the Eleusinian mysteries, and in perverting the meaning of the Oracle’s admonition. For thus the Oracle speaks:
Μη φυσεως καλεσης αυτοπτον αγαλμα,
Ου γαρ χρη κεινους δε βλεπειν πριν σωμα τελεσθη.
That is, "Invoke not the self-conspicuous image of nature, for you must not behold these things before your body has received the purification necessary to initiation." Upon which he observes, "that the self-conspicuous image was only a diffusive shining light, as the name partly declares."[1] But this is a piece of gross ignorance, from which he might have been freed by an attentive perusal of Proclus on the Timæus of Plato: for in these truly divine commentaries we learn, "that the moon is the cause of nature to mortals, and the self-conspicuous image of fontal nature." Σεληνη μεν αιτια τοις θνητοις της φυσεως, το αυτοπτον αγαλμα ουσα της πηγαιας φυσεως. in Tim. p. 260. If the reader is desirous of knowing what we are to understand by the fontal nature of which the moon is the image, let him attend to the following information, derived from a long and deep study of the ancient theology: for from hence I have learned, that there are many divine fountains contained in the essence of the demiurgus of the world; and that among these there are three of a very distinguished rank, viz. the fountain of souls, or Juno, the fountain of virtues, or Minerva, and the fountain of nature, or Diana. This last fountain too immediately depends on the vivific goddess Rhea; and was assumed by the Demiurgus among the rest, as necessary to the prolific production of himself. And this information will enable us besides to explain the meaning of the following passages in Apuleius, which, from not being understood, have induced the moderns to believe that Apuleius acknowledged but one deity alone. The first of these passages is in the beginning of the eleventh book of his Metamorphosis, in which the divinity of the moon is represented as addressing him in this sublime manner: En adsum tuis commota, Luci, precibus, rerum Natura parens, elementorum omnium domina,
- ↑ Divine Legation, p. 231.
