REV, ROBERT TAYLOR, B,A„ on the Devil

THE ASTRONOIICO-THEOLOGICll LECTURES OF THE 

REV, ROBERT TAYLOR, B,A„ 

OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ; MEMBER OF THE ROYAL 

COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, AUTHOR OF THE « DEVIL'S PULPIT," 

"DIEGESIS," "SYNTAGMA," &c. 

"It is those alone who love knowledge, who follow 
reason as the supreme guide, and seek truth as 
the great end, to whom I appeal." 

l*io pi: 

PUBLISHED BY CALYIN BLANCHAKD, 76 Xassau Street. 1851 

IV.-THE DEVIL! 

Paet I. 

" Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the Devil, as a roaring 
Lion, walketh about, seeking whom he can devour ; whom resist 
stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplislied 

in your brethren that are in the world." 1 Peter, v. 8, Having, in the 

pursuit of this most interesting truly divine science, brought 

those who have regularly attended the course of these lectures, 

acquainted the Lord, and shown them the knowledge of the Most 
High: 

The science leads us, in due sequence, to the knowledge of the 

Most Low : the adversary, or stander over against, as he is called, 

from the Latin word adversarius,* the AmJtoAoc of the Greek text, 

of the same signification, diametrically opposite : so that a line drawn 
through the Lord of the Ascendant, which ever it might happen

to be, would pass through Diabolos, or Lord of the opposite sign; 

hence the French word Le Diable ; and the English of our text, 

your Adversary, the Devil, who, as a roaring lion, walketh about, or 

* Adversarius (adjective) opposite, the reverse to. 

 

64 ASTKONOMICOTHEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

TrepnraTei, more literally, walketh round, seeking whom 
he may devour, nva tcaramr}, more literally, whom he 
may swallow up or absorb. 

For when this roaring lion walketh round, so as, in 
his turn, to become Lord of the Ascendant, — so that 
is, when the sun is in this sign, all the Stars in that 
part of the Heavens where he is, are absorbed and 
swallowed up in his effulgence, they become entirely 
invisible, till their divine master has passed by. 

For " at whose sight all the Stars hide their dim- 
inished heads :" 

" Or lost dissolved in his superior rays, 
One tide of glory — ene unclouded blaze 
O'erflows his court." 

x4.nd as this constellation, the roaring Lion, has his 
head directed towards the south, and is coming down- 
ward : the firm in the faith — that is, those who are 
instructed in the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
are admonished to stand, on the opposite side, and to 
contemplate the §tarry Heavens, ex-adversis, as if 
turning their backs on the foul fiend, as the Apostle 
James has it, " Resist the Devil, and he will flee from 
you ;" though our blessed Savior delivers an apparent- 
ly directly contrary injunction, " but I say unto you, 
that ye resist not evil." 

A paradox only to be relieved, by faith — that is, 
not by credulity or implicit belief, but by the proper 
understanding of the science of astronomy, which is 
faith, whereby we understand that this Devil is not 
really evil, nor this resistance moral, but physical and 
scientific merely, which our text virtually asserts in 
those words : " whom resist stedfast in the faith, know- 
ing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your 
brethren that are in the world." That is, these ra avra 
r(*)v TraOefxaruv, these same stories of sufferings, this 

THE DEVIL. 65 

Lion walking round in the Zodiac, and seeming to 
swallow up the Stars, or seeking whom he may devour, 
which are exhibited in the celestial Zodiac, are a type 
or hieroglyphical picture of the like afflictions which 
occur to your brethren that are in the world. 

But who, then, could be the persons to whom this 
Epistle (as it is called the first Epistle General, or the 
first Catholic Epistle of Peter) was addressed? Or 
who the Peter who thus addressed them ? We must 
dig, as it were, into the earth, and shut our eyes to 
hide from ourselves the evidence that blazes before us, 
that this Catholic Epistle is the composition of a Catho- 
lic Abbot, or father of a convent of the order of the 
Vigilant Monks, the Cenobites, or continual watchers, 
who had retired into their monastery, and shut them- 
selves off from all connection with the commerce and 
business of life. 

" From the false world in early youth they fled, 
By him to mountains, rocks, and deserts led ; 
He raised their hallowed walls, the desert smiled ; 
And Paradise was opened in the wild. 
No weeping orphan saw his father's stores, 
Their shrines irradiate or emblaze their floors ; 
But such plain roofs as piety could raise, 
And only vocal with the Maker's praise. 

The very name of Pope Gregory, as the founder 
or consecrator of this order of Vigilant Monks, is in- 
volved in the Greek of the text, be vigilant. Tp^yoprjoare. 
jplay Gregory. And they who, in the teeth of such 
palpable evidence, would cheat themselves or others 
into a notion that it was written by a Jew, must make 
such peace as they can with the author, who expressly 
declares himself (and sure, I hope he ought to know 
best who he was) that he was a Gentile. 

And if ye want to know what sort of a Gentile he 
was, he tells you himself, in the chapter immediately 


66 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTUKES. 

preceding, that he was a lascivious, debauched, drunk- 
en, revelling, banqueting, and abominably idolatrous 
Gentile: though he instructs his holy brethren, that 
he was now getting an old man, he had had enough 
of that kind of life, and intended to become a new 
creature in Christ Jesus, or to put on the new man, 
which, after God, is created in righteousness and true 
holiness ; thus verifying the universal adage that the 
greatest sinners make the greatest saints. 

But 'tis the other sacred personage with whom we 
are now to become acquainted, called expressly by St. 
John, the Divine, that Old Serpent, which is the Devil 
and Satan. 

Now of ail the instances that might be adduced of 
the demoralizing tendency of superstition, and of the 
necessarily false, deceitful, truckling, and ungrateful 
character, which it induces, in all men who yield their 
minds to its bad influence, none is more striking than 
that of the process of opinion and sentiment with res- 
pect to this divine personage. 

Would it be believed, if the evidence were not as 
glaring as the day, that there are those who profess, and 
call themselves Christians, who hesitate not to deny, 
or who boldly avow their doubt of the real and sub- 
stantive existence of the Devil ? 

And that dread majesty of Hell, whose fearful 
name stands first in the Christian's baptismal vow- 
He first, traitor-like, denies to have any existence, — 
thus treating that sacred vow as a mockery : sworn to 
renounce the Devil and all his works : and yet coming 
to a conceit that there is no Devil, and, consequently, 
no works of the Devil to be renounced. 

But if there be no Devil, there is no Savior. You 
cannot take away the foundation-stone of the great 
Christian pillar, and leave the fabric standing. So 
long as Christianity continues to be part and parcel 

THE DEVIL. 67 

of the law of the land, its ever to be venerated forms 
will continue to ascribe all evil deeds to the instigation 
of this mighty spirit. The felon and the criminal only 
become such by the perpetration of such heinous acts 
as they were led to perpetrate, ' not having the fear 
of God before their eyes, but being instigated by the 
Devil.' 

And if, indeed, there were no Devil, or if he were 
a merely imaginary being : a personification of evil, an 
allegorical figure only, — what is to hinder all the other 
personages spoken of in the gospel from being merely 
imaginary beings, and allegorical figures, as well as he ? 
especially when it must be admitted that there is not 
one of the personages mentioned in the gospel, whether 
as a man, woman, or child, a whit more known to his- 
tory than he. 

You would find as many and as credible witnesses 
(and indeed, a great many more) who would profess 
that they had seen the Devil, and conversed with him, 
as ever professed to have seen and conversed with 
Christ, or with any one of his apostles : and we have 
pictures and portraits of him, that are quite as good 
likenesses as the Madonna of Titian, or the Christ of 
Raphael and West. 

You will find no language, either of the Old or New 
Testament, referring to Christ, or his Apostles, or to 
God himself, implying any more substantive or real 
existence in him or them, than the language constant- 
ly used in reference to the Devil and his Angels. 

But what is more, there is no name, attribute, or 
title of Godhead, Power, Majesty, ascribed to the 
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, either in 
the Old or New Testament : but that that same is the 
name, title, and attribute of Satan. 

The character of the Tempter is, in sacred theology, 
rather more appropriate to God than to the Devil. 



68 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTUEES. 

For though the Devil is represented as tempting par- 
ticular individuals : yet God is the Great Universal 
Tempter, who has sent all mankind into a state of_ 
probation, and whom the whole Christian world have 
never hesitated to address and worship, as the Great 
Tempter, in that which is called the Lord's Prayer, 
saying, \ Our Father, which art in Heaven, lead us 
not into temptation :' which would be horrid blasphemy, 
if leading men into temptation were the exclusive 
office and business of Satan. 

For though St. James says, l Let no man say when 
he is tempted, I am tempted of God : for God cannot 
be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man : 
but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of 
his own lust and enticed ;' which cannot but strike a 
reflecting man as a very Atheistical account of the 
matter, a sort of resolving all things into merely natu- 
ral causes: and, as our evangelical clergy call it, 
'shutting God out of his own world.' Yet nothing 
can be more explicit than the assurance, that God did 
tempt Abraham : and St. Paul's most full explanation 
to the Corinthians, that God is not merely the Tempter 
of all men, but takes particular delight in this sort 
of business, — as he tells them, 'there hath not temp- 
tation taken you, but such as is common to man : But 
God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted 
above that ye are able, but will with the temptation, 
also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to 
bear it.' 1 Corinth, x. 13. 

The character of an Accuser is alone distinctively 
peculiar to Satan. But though he is called an Accu- 
ser, even ' the accuser of our brethren, which accused 
them before God, day and night :' yet to an innocent 
man, an accuser was never yet an enemy. None but 
the wicked, none but the guilty, can have cause to 
fear or dislike an accuser. The innocent man may 



THE DEVIL. 69 

make his confident appeal either to God or Devil, like 
King Lear> in the storm : 

" Tremble, thou wretch, 
That hast within thee undivulged crimes 
Unwhipped of justice : hide thee, thou bloody hand, 
Thou perjured, and thou simular man of virtue, 
That under covert and convenient seeming, 
Hast practised on man's life ! close pent up guilts, 
Kive your concealing continents and cry, 
This dread accuser, grace : I am a man 
More sinned against than sinning." 

Satan, though called an accuser, is never said to 
be a false accuser : and in the discharge of his office, 
day and night, before God, there is at least implied 
his abhorrence and detestation of iniquity, transgression 
and sin. It is Christ who is the friend of sinners : 
but the Devil is no friend of theirs, nor they of his: 
and for no better reason than because he is their accu- 
ser — and where is the rogue or thief in the world who 
could be reconciled to the counsel for the Crown, the 
Attorney-General of the universe. For such is Satan, 
f. the government is upon his shoulder, and his name 
shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God, 
the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.' Such 
are the titles and epithets of Satan in the sacred text. 
And till they can rail the text from off the book, they 
but offend their lungs who rail on Satan. 

But the most important of all things to be observ- 
ed is, that though Satan is pre-eminently called an 
adversary, and the Adversary : in the strictly geome- 
trical significancy of that word, as that side of the Areo- 
pagus is adverse, or the diametrically opposite to this : 
and a diameter drawn from any one of these signs of 
the Zodiac, would pass into its adversary ; and any 
two persons, standing opposite to each other, are ad- 
versarii, in relation to their respective positions, — he 



70 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTUEES. 

is never called Hostis, Inimicus, nor by any other 
name which would signify a moral hostility or un- 
friendliness. For opposition is not hostility : and an 
adversary, therefore, not a term of a moral, but of an 
astronomical insignificancy, which significancy will be 
found as the basis of every one of the names given to 
Satan : and is the key that unlocks the whole mystery. 

For, as the sun passes successively through every 
degree of these twelve signs of the Zodiac — the sign 
at which the sun, at any given time, is found to be, 
is for that season or time, the Supreme God : and the 
directly opposite sign is the accuser, the adversary, or 
the Devil : so that they are each of them both God 
and Devil in their turns. 

All the titles and names of the Devil found in the 
Scripture, not excepting one, are the common names 
of the Supreme God : yet all of them, not excepting 
one, are directly indicative of the annual phenomena of 
the Sun's apparent progiess through the twelve months 
of the year. 

Nor is there a single allusion to the character of 
Satan, either in the Old or JSTew Testament, but what 
bears an astronomical sense, and will bear no other. 

The Prince of Darkness is, of course, the adversary 
of the Prince of Light, and consequently persecutes or 
follows after him, as the night must follow the day, and 
the cold and cheerless reign of winter succeeds the 
summer. As the Earth presents its whole surface suc- 
cessively to the Sun ; the illuminated half was the 
Kingdom of Heaven : while the dark side, being ad- 
verse to the Sun, even diabolically adverse, was sym- 
bolically represented as the kingdom of the powers of 
darkness, and literally called Hades, or the Invisible 
World, or Hell, or Bottomless Pit; which, indeed, 
most literally is bottomless, their being no bottom nor 
conceivable limit to the extent of infinite space, towards 



THE DEVIL. 71 

which the Earth presents its adverse or diabolical sur- 
face : and it is none other than the language of the Sun 
eclipsed by the Earth, which we read in the allegori- 
cal complaint of Jonah, when swallowed up by the 
Coetus, or Fish of winter. I went down into the belly 
of Hell, — the Earth, with her bars, was about me for ever. 

It is the angel of the bottomless pit, of whom St. 
John, in the 9th of the Revelation, tells us, that he 
was king over the scorpions, or angels that were like 
scorpions, and that had tails like unto scorpions, and 
there were stings in their tails, and their power was 
to hurt men five months. 

Now there is the scorpion, in the gates of Hell, — 
that is, the Genius of October. Count, if you please, 
the five that are under him, or over which he reigns, 
October, November, December, January, February, 
and there, in March, ' Behold the Lamb of God, that 
taketh away the sin of the world.' 

But observe, I pray, the words of John the Bap- 
tist, who came baptising, and there he is, Aquarius, 
January, Janus, Jonas, IcoavvrjG, the forerunner of 
Christ, have no reference whatever to such an idea as 
that of sin, or as the taking away of sin — ids o Apvog 
tw #£0) o a,LpG)v ttjv afiaprcav t(o Koofio) — is, ' Behold the 
Lamb of God,' or the Celestial Ram, who taketh up, or 
rectifieth the aberration of the Mundane System. 

But that we may not think the worse of our God, 
the Sun, for putting on his diabolical character, or 
think him less worthy of our devotion in his state of 
humiliation than in his glory, when he descended into 
Hell, than when he arose again from the dead, and 
ascended into Heaven : the sacred mystagogue tells us 
explicitly, that the name of their king, this Baalzebub, 
or Belzebub, Lord of Flies, or Lord of the Scorpion, 
is, in the Hebrew tongue, Abaddon : but in the Greek 
tongue he hath his name AnoXXov. 



72 ASTRONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

Now the Hebrew word Abaddon is compounded of 
the two words, Abba, Father, and Don, Lord: where- 
by all good Christians may know who it is that they 
address, when God doth send the spirit of his Son into 
their hearts, whereby they cry, Abba, Father : and we 
perceive that it was no breach of Christian charity, 
but a most correct application of the strictly scientific 
language, when our blessed Savior told the Jews, 
'Ye are of your Father, the Devil.' 

The Greek name of the Devil, AttoXXov, is the 
same as the Latin Apollo, the well known and univer- 
sal name of the Sun. As in the medals of JSTero, this 
God is represented as crowned with laurels, having his 
quiver upon his shoulder, and the Star of Phoebus by 
his side, with the Greek words, ArroXXov Hojrrjp — i. e., 
Apollo, the Savior. 

That the same king of Locusts, Beelzebub Apol- 
lyon, should be the destroyer as well as the Savior, is 
but one among the thousand proofs that I could bring 
that the Savior and the Destroyer are, and ever meant, 
but one and the self-same being. Jehovah, the 
Yahouh, invariably challenging to himself the attribute 
of Destroyer, as well as Creator. As in that well- 
known version of the 100th Psalm : 

" Before Jehovah's awful throne, 
Ye nations bow with sacred joy ; 
Know that the Lord is God alone, 
He can create, and he destroy." 

It is the same eternal Sun, who appears as God 
the Creator, to that Lamb of God who openeth the 
Kingdom of Heaven to all believers, who appearing in 
the adverse sign, the Diabolus, or Devil in the worm 
that never dieth, who, standing there, in October, the 
gates of Hell, is still the Fire that never shall be 
quenched. And this is the solution of that enigmat- 
ical language of St. Paul, whose purport is to show 



THE DEVIL. 73 

that Jesus Christ and the Devil are really but one and 
the self-same God, under different manifestations. The 
Devil becoming Christ, when at the Vernal Equinox, 
he ascends into Heaven, and Christ, in turn, becoming 
the Devil, when he descended into Hell, the proper 
seat and kingdom of Satan. « Now that he ascended,' 
says the Apostle, « what is it, but that he also descend- 
ed first into the lower parts of the earth. He that 
descended, is the same also that ascended, far 
above all heavens, that he might fill all things ;' that 
is, that he might pass through every one of the signs 
of the Zodiac, as he does every year, thus accomplish- 
ing his annual ministry ; of which he speaks in his 
hieroglyphic character, to the Doctors in the Temple. 
' The spirit of the Lord is upon me : because he 
hath Christed me to preach deliverance to the cap- 
tives, and recovering of sight to the blind (that is, to 
give the day in due succession to our antipodes, who, 
of course, are in the dark when we are in . the light, 
it being night with them when it is day with us), and 
to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.' Language, 
than which astronomy itself could not be more 
astronomical. 

But take all the names of the Devil which occur 
in Scripture, and all the attributes ascribed to him, they 
will be found to be the common names and attributes 
of the Supreme God. 

1 1 appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob,' 
saith he, in the 6th of Exodus, ' by my name.' 

Baal Shadai, God Almighty, 
•jn^-ba Bel-Aitan, the Mighty Lord. 
Wfea Bel-Geh, the Lord of Health. 
3*fca Bel Ial (Belial) Lord of the Opposite. 

Baal-Zebub, Lord of the Scorpion. 

Baal Berith, Lord of the Covenant. 

Baal Peor, Lord of the Opening. 

4 

74 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOaiCAL LECTUEES. 

Baal Perazina, Lord of the Divisions. 

Baal Zephon, Lord of the North. 

Baal-Saraen, Lord of Heaven. 

Adoni Bezek, Lord of Glory. 

Moloch Zedeck, King of Righteousness. 
Lucifer, Son of the Morning ; or, as it is rendered 
in the margin (Isaiah xiv. 12). Day Star, the very 
name of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. The 
Day Star from on high, that visited and redeemed his 
people ; or, in his own express challenge of that name, 
and in the 22d of the Apocalypse : — I, Jesus, am the 
bright and Morning Star, than which he could not 
have said in plainer words, I, Jesus, am Lucifer ; that 
is, I am the Devil and Satan. ' And no marvel,' says 
the apostle, ' for Satan himself is transformed into an 
angel of light.' 

And most literally indeed might he say, no mar- 
vel ! For 'tis no marvel, these transformations of 
Christ into the Devil, and of the Devil back again into 
Christ,being as regular as the succession of day and night. 
All these, and innumerable others of like effect, are 
the names of Satan in the Old Testament, as we find the 
same divine personage expressly called God in the New 
Testament, 'the God of this world,' by St. Paul. 

' The Prince of this ■ world,' by Christ himself. 
The Chaldean for the Hebrew word pia, Bole, or 
Baal, is Kp, Bel : and hence Bel and the Dragon are 
but one and the same Deity, who was worshipped by 
the Phoenicians and Canaanites under the name of 
Dagon : which is compounded of the two words 
Dag, the Fish, and Ov, the Sun: that is, the sun in 
the constellation of the fish ; that is, when the great 
whale of the northern constellations is Lord of the 
Ascendant, and seems for the three days and three 
nights, the 2 2d, 23d and 24th of December, to have 
swallowed up the sun. So said the Hierophant of 



THE DEVIL. 75 

the spell, ' an evil and adulterous generation seeketh 
after a sign, and there shall be no sign given it but 
the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonas was three 
days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the 
Son of Man be three days and three nights in the 
heart of the earth.' It being exactly three days and 
three nights cut off from the reign or life of our old 
friend Jonas, Janus, or January, falling about a week 
or ten days earlier than in our reckoning, which are 
every year swallowed up in the cold and watery Fish. 
Milton, who was too good a scholar not to know 
that the Hebrew name, spo, Shetan, Satan, signified 
opposition, but not enmity, makes Satan himself give 
us its etymological signification — 

" I, Satan, and I glory in the name. 
Antagonist of Heaven's Almighty King." 

But we shall not wonder that the characters of 
Christ and the Devil should prove so much alike in 
every other respect, that the Devil only could tell 
where was the difference, when we find the Christ of 
the New Testament so emphatically declaring that it 
was none other than himself, who was typified by that 
same Old Serpent, who, being indeed the God of this 
world, has been worshipped by every nation, kindred, 
tongue, and people under Heaven : and in every age 
and time in which the world has existed. * For as 
Moses lifted up the Serpent in the Wilderness : even 
so must the Son of Man be lifted up.' Ophiolatry, or 
Serpent-worship, was the most extensive and univer- 
sal religion that ever existed. 

The serpent was the universal type and emblem of 
the Supreme God. 

In the ancient ritual of Zoroaster, the great ex- 
panse of the Heavens, and even nature itself, was 
described under the symbol of a Serpent. 



76 ASTRONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

Serpents were worshipped in Persia, and through- 
out the East, and had temples built to their honor, 
under the express titles of tieug rcog [xeyiOTog, aai ap- 
yrjyojc, rov oXuv, the greatest of all Gods, and the 
superintendent of the whole world. 

By their truly magnificent and silent motion in 
progression, they represented the elliptical orbits of the 
planets ; and their bright scales, the countless millions 
of Stars, revolving orbit within orbit, yet never clash- 
ing ; and advancing, as our whole solar system has, 
by the only late discoveries of Halley, Lemonnier, 
Cassini and Herschel, been ascertained to be advan- 
cing the whole together through infinite space towards 
the constellation Hercules.* 

Yet all guided by one purpose, all with one life 
instinctive. 

Their motion without the aid of limb, or any split- 
ting or division of the body in any parts, presented 
the most lively type of the unity of the Godhead, his 
independence of all foreign support or assistance, his 
strength and life in being himself. 

By putting his head in his mouth, the serpent is 
the well-emblem of eternity. 

By shedding its skin, as it does, four times a year. 
It is an emblem of immortality, so curiously and enig- 
matically described by St. Paul — ' not that we would 
be unclothed, but clothed upon.' 

By its hissing noise is represented the voice of 
God, which was never distinctly articulate, but always 
very terrible, as Isaiah assures us, ' that the Lord will 
hiss unto them from the end of the Earth : and he 
will hiss for the fly of Egypt.' The fly of Egypt 
being the Cock Chafer, or Hercules Scarabceus, one 

* Or, more accurately, to a point in the Heavens whose right 
ascension is 250° 52' 30", and whose north polar distance is 40° 
22'. 



THE DEVIL. - 77 

of the names of Jesus Christ, which I explained in a 
former lecture. 

But, above all, its sanative or healing powers ren- 
dered the Serpent, the universal emblem of health and 
salvation, and the invariably attendant symbol of the 
Gods called Saviors, Hercules, Apollo, iEsculapius, 
Bacchus, Mercury, Adonis, all are characterized and 
known as Saviors, by the accompanying symbolic 
Serpent. 

The Serpent was worshipped as the Areph, or 
Serapis of Egypt, as the Agatho-Demon, or Creator of 
the world of India, the Good Genius of Persia, as the 
Person of Vichenu himself, in Hindostan, as Vitze- 
puptzli, the Supreme God of the Mexicans. 

Surely, of all ways that ever could have been de- 
vised to restrain the Israelites from Idolatry (could we 
for one moment imagine that there had been a word 
of truth in any part of their history) the most mon- 
strous is that recorded in the 21st of Numbers, ' that 
the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and 
they bit the people, and much people of Israel 
died. And the Lord said unto Moses : Make thee a 
fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole ; and it shall come 
to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he look- 
eth upon it shall live.' Which is none other than a 
version of his own words, in the 45th of Isaiah, 
6 Look unto me, and be ye saved, all ye ends of the 
Earth, for I am God alone, and besides me there is 
no Savior.' 

And here, indeed, almost from the ends of the 
Earth, our altar-piece presents you the self-same snaky 
serpentine Savior. 

In this emblem, brought from the ruins of the 
Temple of Mithra, at Naki-Rustan, the ancient Perse- 
polis — a /Sun, with wings, and in those wings, as you 
see, supported that Old Serpent, the universal em- 



78 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

blem of healing, the very picture to. the words of the 
prophet Micah. 

' Unto you that fear my name, shall the Sun of 
Righteousness arise, with healing in his wings.' 

Well, then, might St. John call the Serpent that 
Old Serpent, the Devil. For the worship of that Old 
Serpent can be shown, by astronomical monuments, to 
have been established in the world more than fifteen 
thousand years ago. 

Never was the age or time in which the celestial 
constellations presented not the wintry serpent pursu- 
ing, immediately upon the heels of the woman, who 
was clothed with the Sun, seeking to devour her man- 
child. The most incontestible monuments have prov- 
ed that this system of the signs of the Zodiac, as it is 
now received, was fully established when, according 
to it, Libra, the Scales of September, was the sign of 
the Vernal, and Aries, of the Autumnal Equinox — that 
is, that the precession of the Equinoxes has produced 
a change of more than seven signs. 

Now, the most learned Bernard has shown, that the 
ancient Egyptian priests calculated this motion of pre- 
cession, or precession of the Equinoxes, as it is called, 
with the most perfect accuracy, as we do at this day, at 
fifty seconds, nine-thirds, and the three-fourths of a 
third degree in a year ; in consequence of which, an 
entire degree is lost, or displaced in seventy-one years 
eight or nine months, and an entire sign 2152, or 53 
years. 

Now, it being known, as it is, to all astronomers, 
that the Equinoxial point of Spring was in the first 
degree of Aries, in the year 388 before our present 
era, it follows that it had left Taurus 2153 years be- 
fore that time, and had entered it about 4692 years 
before Jesus Christ, — thus, ascending from sign to 
sign, the first degree of Libra was the autumnal Equi- 



THE DEVIL. 79 

noctial point, 12,912 years before 388 before Christ. 
Add that 388 years before Christ with our 1830 years 
to the present time, and the amount is 15,130 years. 

To which accurately established period you must 
again throw in the allowance of the length of ages that 
it would take before the Egyptian priests themselves 
would have arrived at so wonderfully accurate a sci- 
ence of astronomical calculations, in which they have 
not been surpassed by the Cassinis, Halleys, Newtons, 
and Herschels of our Christian yesterday. 

Thus precisely the same theological confusion and 
contradiction, upon the same basis of real astronomical 
science, demonstrates the absolute identity of what is 
called the Christian Dispensation, and the Pagan 
Mythology. 

Once possessed of the key, the difficulty vanishes. 
The Holy Ghost is God in the Spring, Jesus Christ 
is God in the Summer, Jehovah is God in the Autumn, 
and the Devil is God in the Winter. According to 
that famous verse of the Orphic Song : 

Eic Zevc, etg Aid?]g, eig RXiog, eig Atovvoog, 
Eter deog ev Tavreooi: 

That is one Jupiter, one Pluto, one Apollo, one 
Bacchus. It is but one God in them all. Or as, per- 
haps, I shall more easily find forgiveness, for quoting 
a Christian plagiarism of the same great truth : 

" These, as they change, Almighty Father, these, 
Are but the varied God ; the rolling year 
Is full of thee : forth in the pleasing Spring 
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love. 
Then comes thy glory in the Summer months, 
With light and heat refulgent. 
Thy bounty shines in Autumn, unconfined, 
And spreads a common feast for all that live. 
In Winter, awful thou, with clouds and storms, 
Riding sublime, thou bid'st the world adore, 
And humblest nature with thy northern blast." 



V -THE DEVIL ! 



PAET II. 
JOB I — 3^» 



[After repeating the whole of the chapter, as a specimen of 
declamatory narrative, the Rev. Gentleman proceeded] : — 

Men and Beetheen, — I found it impossible, 
within the compass of any one lecture, to do justice 
to the infinitely interesting subject on which I entered 
in my last. In spite of all the disadvantage to the 
understanding of those who come new and strange to 
this sublime science, and can consequently have little 
or no idea of the argumentative process through which 
we have advanced, I must now resume the glorious 
science — beseeching only the candor — nay, the com- 
mon honesty and justice of that fair allowance, which 
all honest and sensible men would feel themselves 
bound to make in every other case, where they had 
happened to come in, for the first time, upon the far 
advanced stage of a course of scientific demonstrations : 
and not knowing the premises on which the reasonings 
had been founded, nor the proofs by which previous 
conclusions had been established, should find them- 
selves, as it might be, in a new world of thought, and 
things entirely wondrous and strange to their apprehen- 
sion, treated of as familiar and evident to the under- 
standings of those who had the happiness to be before 
them in the pursuit of knowledge and learning. 



THE DEVIL. 81 

For surely not to make such allowance, to stumble 
in, merely upon the middle of a course of science, or 
upon the middle of a single lecture of that course, and 
upon the first thing that he might hear, not having 
heard what had gone before, nor what was to follow, 
that had struck him as strange and extraordinary to 
assume a right to judge, or to suppose himself com- 
petent to form a judgment, were no more justice, nor 
no more reason, than that of the fool in the Apologue, 
who, having a house to sell, presented one of the bricks 
of which it was built as a specimen of the whole edifice: 
without any more formality of deprecations and apolo- 
gies, then, I recur at once to the subject of my last 
discourse, to our old acquaintance, to Satan, that old 
Serpent, as he is called by St. John, the divine, 'that 
old Serpent, which is called the Devil, and Satan, the 
great Red Dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, 
and a tail which drew the third part of the stars of 
heaven, and cast them to the Earth.' 

I have repeated to you the whole of the first chap- 
ter of the first book (and, as some think, the oldest 
book in the world) in which first the name of Satan 
occurs, and where it occurs, together with as grand 
and sublime an exhibition of the part and character he 
bears in the sacred drama as was ever conveyed in 
language. 

I have repeated the whole of it, not merely to do 
what justice I could to a scene that is second in gran- 
deur, in pathos, or in sentiment, to no passage of the 
ancient Greek tragedians, nor even of our British 
Shakespere ; and the due reading of which, as it might 
and ought to be read, would add laurels to the brow 
of a Kemble or a Siddons: but also, from that prin- 
ciple of critical fidelity which I have ever stedfastly 
observed, and will never fail to observe, as the grand 
ruling axiom of these demonstrations, never for any 

4* 



82 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

consideration whatever to garble the sacred text, or to 
quote any passage of it, in such a way as to make it 
seem to bear a sense which would not be its proper 
and apparent sense, in the whole context and purport 
of the book from which I quote it. 

This book of Job, in the English version of the 
Polyglott Bible, printed page by page opposite the 
Latin of the Vulgate of Pope Sextus Y. and Pope 
Clement VIII., presents, in its margin, the words, 
'Moses is thought to have written this Book of Job, 
whilst among the Midianites,' B. C. 1520. 

If it were so, the book was written before the Ex- 
odus of the Children of Israel out of Egypt, before the 
call of Moses to be their deliverer, before the five books 
of the Pentateuch ; and, consequently, in Christian 
admission, it stands admitted to be the oldest of all 
books which either the Jewish or the Christian world 
have received as of divine inspiration, and therefore, 
the oldest book in the world. 

While its internal evidence supplies a proof demon- 
strative, which no Christian, who knew what a critical 
demonstration means, could resist, of the absolute 
truth, and indenegandible certainty of the principles 
on which our science has proceeded from stage to stage, 
from step to step, in enucleating the latent sense, and 
unravelling the clue of the whole 'mystery of God, and 
of the Father, and of Christ.' 

I have shewn you, in my last lecture, that the 
priests of Egypt, of whom Moses, or whoever was the 
author of the books ascribed to Moses, was one, and 
which Egyptian priests are the undoubted compilers, 
both of our Old and of our New Testament, had cultiva- 
ted the science of astronomy, and attained a perfec 
tion of knowledge in that science, which has not been 
surpassed, even by the last and most refined demon 
strations of our own Sir Isaac Newton, Lemonier, 



THE DEVIL. 83 

Cassini, Halley, and Herschell. So that many of the 
great truths which our vanity has ascribed to modern 
discoveries in astronomy, are found to be nothing more 
than recoveries, disclosures, and bringings to light of 
that occult science, which lay hid under the thick veil, 
and palpable obscurity of a mystical theology. 

Thus the great secret of the properties of the mag- 
netic needle, the mariner's compass, which, we are 
told, was first discovered by the Venetian Marco Paulo, 
in the year 1260, only 570 years ago, had been known 
to the priests for ages before that time, had subserved 
their purposes, extended their power, and directed 
their voyages, while it was entirely concealed from the 
knowledge of the vulgar, under the veil of precisely 
such allegories as those of our sacred Scriptures are 
found to be. 

The priests of Jupiter Ammon carried the magnet 
with them, in a compass box, as the Ark of the 
Covenant of their God, which it was death for the un- 
sanctiried to look into. 

It was enough that the brute uncurious people 
could be put off with a miracle. They were told that 
Hercules had sailed across the ocean in a vase, directed 
by the arrow of Apollo. It was gospel, and they 
suspected no other meaning than the grossest and 
most literal one, Hercules was God, and nothing was 
impossible to God. 

The poet Homer, 900 years before the Christian 
era, and 2160 years before the pretended discovery of 
Marco Paulo, had given a yet plainer hint of the 
possession of the great secret by the priests, for perhaps 
as many thousand years before his time. The priests 
of Phceacia had ships that were inspired : and in the 
8th Odyssy of Homer they are thus described : 

'Xo pilot's aid the Phceacian vessels need, 
Themselves instinct with life securely speed, 



84 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

Endued with wondrous skill, untaught they share 
The purpose and the will of them they bear. 
To fertile realms and distant climates go, 
And where each realm and city lies they know, 
Swiftly they fly, and thro' the pathless sea, 
Tho' wrapt in clouds and darkness find their way.' 

You see the Devil was in the ships, the sailors 
were all conjurors, and Alcinous, their great high 
priest by these apparently supernatural means, pre- 
sented on his table the fruits of every point of latitude 
on the terraqueous globe, in every month of the year. 
His 'commerce collected the riches of all climates, and 
the purple of Tyre was exchanged for the precious 
thread of Serica; the soft tissues of Kachemire for the 
sumptuous tapestry of Lydia ; the amber of the Baltic, 
for the pearls and perfumes of Arabia ; the gold of 
Ophir, for the tin of Thule. 7 But it was all by witch- 
craft. 

In like manner the telescope, ascribed as a modern 
invention, to Galileo Galilsei, about the year of our 
era 1640, had been known to the colleges of the priests 
for countless ages before that time ; and was concealed 
from the curiosity of the credulous multitude, under 
the allegorical miracle, that Pythagoras could read 
inscriptions on the Moon. 

Near the city of Benares, in India, are the astrono- 
mical instruments which, at a period of incalculably 
remote antiquity, had been used for making solar and 
lunar observations, cut out of the solid rock of a 
mountain. And Diogenes Laertius, a Greek historian 
of the first century, assures us, on the authority of an 
Egyptian priest, that from the reign of Vulcan, or 
Ptha, son of Nilus, until the arrival of Alexander, 
there had been observed in Egypt 372 eclipses of the 
Sun, coincidently with 832 eclipses of the Moon. 

It is madness only, or extreme ignorance, that 



THE DEVIL. 85 

would talk of such accuracies and precision of calculation 
being; imaginary. The exhibition of those hiero-glyphical 
symbols and diagrams in the monstrous shapes of 
bulls, rams, crabs, lions, virgins, in the architectural 
structure of the porches of their temples, which 
amused and deceived the vulgar, contained the 
clue to the esoteric or interior doctrine, which consisted 
of the purest and most accurate principles of 
astronomical science. In the Peristyle of the ancient 
temple of Esneh, the ancient Latoplis, in Upper Egypt, 

its ruins still remaining, though much sunk 
below the present level of the Earth, even in our 
own times, has been found a construction of the 
signs of the Zodiac, precisely such as is received at 
this day: by the most indubitable of all evidence of 
date, showing the date of the building of that edifice 
to have been 6430 years ago, which is 596 years 
older than our Bible date of the creation of the 
world. 

Of which great astronomical principles, the univer- 
sally established worship of that great Serpent, the 
Devil, as an emblem and type of the great expanse 
of the visible heavens, is really magnificent evidence. 
As, among the many other reasons which I adduced, 
so very especially for the deep science of the reason 
of its grand and silent motion representing the ellipti- 
cal orbits of the planets : and its bright scales, in the 
healthy state of the animal, studded with gold 'sky-tinc- 
tured grain and colour dipt in Heaven,' representing 
the countless myriads of Suns, revolving orbit within 
orbit, yet never clashing: while its progression, or 
motion in advance, exhibited at the same time the 
only lately recovered truth of the similar advance of 
our whole solar system. 

Planets, Suns, and adamantine spheres, wheeling 
unshaken through the vast immense, toward the 



86 ASTKONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTUEES. 

constellation Hercules, and yielding their place in in- 
finite space, to a succession of system beyond system, 
universe beyond universe, till the tired thought sinks 
under the immensity of its own conception. The 
Serpent, therefore, of all the things else in nature, 
was the last that could have been the symbol of an 
ignorant idolatry. 

It could not have been what a fool might have 
guessed at, that was all that was meant by the worship 
of that old Serpent, when we have ascertained that 
among its worshippers, the priests of Egypt were so 
accurately acquainted with the whole theory of the 
universe, as to have calculated the motion of the pre- 
cession of the equinoxes, to the nicety of establish- 
ing that motion to be fifty seconds, nine thirds, and 
three fourths of a third of a degree in a year, by 
which the Sun fails of coming up to precisely the 
same point, in the same given time of his annual 
course : and thus an entire degree is lost in seventy- 
one years, eight or nine months ; and an entire sign in 
2152 or 2153 years. 

Whereby, if the Sun sets out from any Star or 
other fixed point in the Heavens, the moment when 
he is departing from the Equinoctial, he will come to 
the same Equinox twenty minutes, seventeen and a 
half seconds of time before he completes his course, so 
as to arrive at the same star or point from whence he 
set out. So that the solar year is twenty minutes, 
seventeen seconds and a half short of the sydereal 
year. The Greek Aristarchus of Samos, 264 years 
before Christ, had announced that the Earth is but a 
point in the universe : that it is spherical : that it 
turns round on its own axis, moving in the oblique 
circle of the Zodiac, while the heavens are at rest : 
that the Sun is a fixed Star, and the fixed Stars are 
Suns. 



THE DEVIL. 87 

The ancient Chaldeans are admitted, by all the 
learned in these subjects, to have been so much be- 
forehand in astronomical science as to have calculated 
the length of the solar year, to the mathematical pre- 
cision of determining its length to be 365 days, 5 
hours, 49 minutes, and 30 seconds. 

Astronomers so absolutely accurate, as that the 
nicety of their calculations, even to a moment, remains 
unshaken by the severest criticism of modern science : 
assuring us as they do, that since the system of 
the signs of the Zodiac had been universally received, 
the point of the Vernal Equinox had been in the first 
degree of Libra ; establishes the fact on the most 
simple principles of arithmetic, even to the nicety of 
the setting of a chronometer, that that time must have 
been the 1st of September, 15,129 years, 5 months, 13 
days, and, if it be at this moment nine o'clock, 
twenty-one hours ago. 

While, by a more than curious coincidence, the 
English of the Polyglott version of the Bible, assigns 
the 1st of September, 4004 years before Christ, as 
the Epocha of the creation of the world: and the 
learned Dr. Lightfoot instructs us, that Adam was 
created on a Friday morning, September the first, at 
nine o'clock : that he ate the forbidden fruit about 
one ; and that Christ was promised about three o'clock 
in the afternoon, (Diegesis, 425.) 

But, perhaps, even the dunce who would quarrel 
with the multiplication table, and whose dulness 
would be inaccessible to a mathematical demonstra- 
tion, may at least respect the authority of his own 
book. And even in his own book, which he admits 
to be the oldest book in the world, he will find the 
Egyptien system of astronomy to have been entirely 
in vogue when that book was written, and the names 



88 ASTKONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTUEES. 

of some of the constellations the very same as they 

are received among us to this day. 

It is represented as the language of God himself, 

and in no part of Scripture besides is there any langu- 
age to be found so worthy of a God : — 

" Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of 
the Earth ? When the morning stars sang together, 
and all the sons of God shouted for joy. 

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleia- 
des, or loose the bands of Orion ? Canst thou bring 
forth Mazzaroth, in his season? or canst thou guide 
Arcturus with his sons ? Knowest thou the ordinances 
of Heaven ? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in 
the Earth ?" 

Here, then, have we the key to the great mystery: 
the Sons of God are the stars; the ordinances of 
Heaven are the principles of Astronomy; the Pleia- 
des are the seven beautiful Stars, in the forehead of 
the Bull ; Orion is that most beautiful of all the con- 
stellations which you may see this evening, the most 
glorious ornament of our nocturnal hemisphere ; the 
Mazzaroth are the twelve signs of the Zodiac ; Arctu- 
rus is that great fixed Star of the first magnitude in 
the constellation Bootes, near the- Bear's tail ; and the 
Sons of that distinguished Star are the Stars of in- 
ferior magnitude that make up the whole sixty-four 
of that glorious constellation. Knowing, then, who 
the Sons of God are, we know who Satan was : for 
when the Sons of God came to present themselves 
before the Lord, Satan came also among them : Satan, 
then, was one of the Sons of God, and brother of 
our Lord Jesus Christ : with this only distinction, 
that he was the favorite, and his advice and counsel 
consulted by God, who suffered his Son Jesus Christ, 



THE DEVIL. 89 

to be crucified and slain, but never suffered the Devil 
to get into any trouble whatever. 

Nor does Satan in this interview with the 
Almighty, exhibit an unjust character. The worst of 
him was, that his opinions were of an evangelical 
turn : he had taken up the notion of the general cor- 
ruption of human nature, and thought that even the 
piety of Job himself might be attributable to sordid 
and selfish motives : but whether right or wrong in 
his judgment, his guiding principle was, his abhor- 
rence of hypocrisy and priestcraft : he loved righteous- 
ness and hated iniquity. 

The character in which Satan is presented in this 
sacred book, however it be understood, is a character 
of superior wisdom. His wisdom is represented as 
directing the providence of God : and no other, or no 
better reason have our divines for identifying him 
with the Serpent that beguiled Eve by his subtlety, 
than that assigned by the sacred text, which every- 
body knows, but nobody understands : ' Now the 
Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field 
which the Lord God had made.' 

From the fact of the Serpent representing in 
hieroglyph all the great theories of astronomical science, 
the infinite number or the fixed stars, by its shining 
scales, the elliptical orbits of the planets by its un- 
dulating folds : the progress of the whole system, 
throughout infinite space, by its motion in progression, 
the unity of the great directing mind, by its independ- 
ence of 'member, joint, or limb,' (in so peculiar a 
manner having life within itself), the eternity of God, 
and of the universe by its easy junction of head and 
tail forming a perfect circle: the immortality of the 
soul by shedding of its skin, and bursting again and 
again into renovated life and youth, and the moral 
regeneration of putting off the old man with his 



90 ASTRONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

deeds, and putting on the new man, which, after God 
— that is, after the example or emblem of God, the 
Serpent, is created unto righteousness and true holi- 
nes: these accordances and resemblances, which no 
creature nor object else in nature presented, by the 
natural and unavoidable metaphor of language, ren- 
dered the Serpent the type of wisdom and learning. 

The Serpent itself was imagined to be concious of 
all the sublime ideas which its physical characteristics 
typified: by a bold metaphor, it was wisdom itself 
personified : 

1. It was the Agathodaemon or good Serpent, en- 
circling the Mundane Egg of the most ancient theo- 
logy of Persia. 

2. It was, again, the Serpent, Ananda, on whose 
mysterious folds the Creator of the world had slept 
upon the bosom of the ocean during the calpa, or 
period of 100,000 years of the Pouranas of India. 

3. It was the spirit of God that moved upon the 
face of the waters in the cosmogony of Moses. 

4. It was the wisdom which was with God, as 
one brought up with him, and which was daily his 
delight, whom the Lord possessed in the beginning of 
his way, before the works of old, of the sublime 
theology of Solomon. 

5. It was the Genius of Virtue (of the not less 
sublime song of Prodicus), addressing her favoured 
Hercules : 

" But with the Gods and God-like men I dwell ; 
Me, his supreme delight, th' Almighty Sire 
Regards well pleased, whatever works excel 
All, or divine or human, I inspire." 

6. It was the Logos, or ' word of God, that was 
in the beginning with God, and which was God, by 
whom all things were made, and without whom was 



THE DEVIL. 91 

not any thing made that was made,' of St. John's 
gospel. 

7. It was the Holy Ghost, with its never-to-be- 
mistaken cloven-tongue of fire, that sat upon the 
heads of the apostles : of which the apostle James 
explains, the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity 
that setteth on fire the course of nature, and is set on 
fire of Hell. 

It being remembered, as I hope it is, that I have 
shown Hell fire, and the Devil, have no such meaning 
as the ignorance of believers, and the craft of preach- 
ers have attached to them. 

A cloven tongue, the most significant emblem of 
a double sense, and of there being two ways of tell- 
ing a story, would, one might think, be as little to be 
mistaken as a cloven foot. 

The Ophite priests, who held up the Serpent to the 
adoration of the wonder-loving world, as they were 
the most learned of mankind, were said and believed 
to have received their learning from serpents. 

It is most apparently from this phasnomenon of the 
Serpent shedding its skin, that Job, who was an 
Ophite priest, and whose name itself signifies a Ser- 
pent, SWa, Aiub, deduced his hope of immortality in 
that sublime, but never understood apostrophe, 'I 
know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall 
stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though, 
after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my 
flesh shall I see God.' Job xix. 25. 

So the name of Eve, which Adam gave to his 
wife, 'because she was the mother of all living,' in 
the judgment of the most learned authorities I could 
quote, the celebrated Bryant, and as quoted by him, 
in the judgment of Clemens Alexandrinus, signified a 
Serpent. So that if he had the true reading of the 
story of the fall of our first parents, it might turn out 



92 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTUEES. 

that instead of its having been the Devil who tempt- 
ed the woman, it was the woman who tempted the 
Devil, — an insinuation almost more than insinuated in 
that severe objurgation which Milton represents his 
Adam, as addressing to her after her faux-jpas. 

" Out of my sight, thou Serpent ! that name best 
Befits thee, with him leagued thyself as false 
And hateful : nothing wants but that thy shape, 
Like his, and colour serpentine might show 
Thy inward fraud to warn all creatures from thee 
Henceforth, lest that too heavenly form pretended 
To hellish falsehood snare them. But for thee 
I had persisted happy, had not thy pride 
And wand 'ring vanity, when least was fit, 
Eejected my forewarning, and disdained 
Not to be trusted, longing to be seen : 
Though by the Devil himself, him overweening 
To overreach, 0, why did God, 
Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven, 
With spirits masculine, create at last 
This novelty on Earth, this fair defect 
Of nature?" 

We find the Christ of the gospels, not only ex- 
horting his disciples to * be wise as Serpents,' but ex- 
pressly claiming the Serpent, which Moses lifted up 
in the wilderness, as a type and symbol of himself. 
And the very earliest sect of Christians were designat- 
ed by the name of Ophites, or Ophiani, on account of 
their paying divine honors to the Serpent. 

In Egypt (never forgetting that Moses was learned 
in all the wisdom of the Egyptians), was a Serpent 
named Thermuthis, which was looked upon as sacred, 
which the Egyptians are said to have made use of as 
a royal Tiara, with which they ornamented the Statues 
of the Goddess Isis. But that very name, Thermu- 
this, happens to be none other than the name which 
Josephus gives us, as the name of Pharoah's daugh- 
ter, the foster-mother of Moses. 



THE DEVIL. 93 

And surely, imagination could not conceive a more 
express and formal institution of Ophiolatry or Serpent- 
worship, than that of setting up a Serpent upon a pole, 
endowed with power, or believed to be endowed with 
power, of healing the diseases of all that looked to it 
for health and salvation. For the sacred text is even 
so : ' The Lord sent fiery Serpents among the peo- 
ple, and they bit the people, and much people of 
Israel died. And Moses made a Serpent of brass, 
and put it upon a pole ; and it came to pass, that if a 
Serpent had bitten any man when he beheld the 
Serpent of brass, he lived.' 

What were the poor people to do? Here was 
their God, in one fit, actually biting and stinging 
them into the worship of a brazen serpent ; and in 
another, in thunder and lightning, proclaiming, 4 Thou 
shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor the 
likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or in 
the Earth beneath, nor in the water under the Earth.' 

So that the poor snake-bitten Israelite had not an 
alternative, as to whether or not he would become an 
idolator. He would die if he didn't, and he would 
be damn'd if he did. 

'Happy art thou, O Israel ! who is like unto thee, 
O people, saved of the Lord!' Only which would 
they like best, God who stung them, or the Devil who 
healed them ? 

But what meant the sarcastic chief of sinners, 
when in the third of his second Epistle to the Corin- 
thians, he exclaimed, « Even to this day, when Moses 
is read, the veil is upon their hearts, which veil is done 
away in Christ,' but the thick cloak and deep dis- 
guising mantle of a barbarous and obsolete language, 
in the ignorance of which, the Greek and Roman 
people, as well as the great bulk of the religious com- 
munities of Christendom have been hindered from de- 



94 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOaiCAL LECTUEES. 

tecting the true origin of the superstition that has 
subdued their reason ? Or it would have been discov- 
ered, that these same jfor?/ Serpents are in the original 
text nwtan-irfittjnan, he nacheism, he Seraphim ; and 
the Serpent made of brass — "na^Serap, the very name 
of the Egyptian God, Serapis, whose bishops were 
known and recognized .under the name of Bishops of 
Christ, which really does do away the veil in Christ, 
by discovering to us, that Serapis and Christ are one 
and the self-same Egyptian Idol. 

As the name of Moses is precisely the same, con- 
sisting of the self-same consonant letters as *iittj, 
Mesheh, the Egyptian name of Bacchus, in whose 
mystical worship the most peculiar feature was, the 
extraordinary homage and respect paid to Serpents. 
The frantic women, running about with Serpents in 
their hands, putting them in their bosoms, twisting 
them in their hair, and a thousand times repeating 
the mystic word : even none other than that very, 
word which, to this day, you see written upon your 
Christian altar-pieces, the I.H.S., most falsely inter- 
preted, Jesus Hominum Salvator, Jesus the Saviour 
of Men, but which really was TIES, Hues, the favour- 
ite and most sacred name of Bacchus, God of wine. 

In like manner have the letters AD, put before the 
date of the year, been monstrously read as an ab- 
breviation of the Latin words Anno Domini, in the 
year of our Lord: whereas, the real meaning is, the 
whole, undivided, and unabbreviated, name of Ad, 
the Sun, who really is the Lord of the year, as that 
name expressly signified, the one and only God : and 
that God which none other than the Jupiter Sabazius, 
or Lord of Sabaoth, the Diog Nwc — that is, the 
hoyog, word, or wisdom of God, was expressed in the 
Syriac and Babylonian word, Ait h- Am, which is 
Sathan, or Satan, which was typified under the form 



THE DEVIL. 95 

of a Serpent or Fiery Dragon, and addressed by his 
worshippers in the mystic words Io Nissi. ' O Lord, 
be thou my guide.' 

And there, sirs, to this very day, in the arms of 
the city of London, have you a couple of Devils sup- 
porting the shield, in their own proper shape of fiery 
flying dragons, and the old Babylonish form of prayer, 
Io Nissi, ' O Lord, be thou my guide,' translated 
into the Monkish Latin, Domine Dirige Nos, ' O Lord 
direct us.' 

The City of London being, from time before all 
records, under the guardian providence of the God 
Satan, typified by those fiery flying Dragons : as the 
city of Paris, to this day, is denominated, from the 
Goddess Isis, irapa-loug — that is, under the protection 
of Isis, by the title of Notre dame — Our lady : and 
as the city of Ephesus was dedicated to the same 
divine Lady, under her Grecian name of Diana. 
' For what man is there that knoweth not that the city 
of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great Goddess 
Diana, and of the image which fell down from. Jupi- 
ter?' 

It has been merely the substitution of one set of 
names for another : the universally obtaining practice 
of conducting religious worship in languages and 
words not understood by the people: the universal 
witnesses of the people themselves, to be ignorant of 
the origin and meaning of the words they used. And 
the trick of the Latin Monks, in giving Latin in- 
terpretations to words of which they themselves 
knew not the meaning that have caused an appearance 
of infinite difference, where, in reality, there was 
none at all, and made Paganism and Christianity, 
which are in reality one and the same religion, and 
Father, Son and Holy Ghost, which are as really one 
and the same God, to be two religions and three 



96 ASTEONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

Gods : there was never much to be feared from the 
criticism of people who were willing to be deceived. . 
So the Monks, wholly ignorant that the name Ad was 
the ancient Ammonian title of the Sun, when they 
couldn't tell what the word meant, could find out a 
meaning for the letters, and A stood as well for Anno 
as it would have stood for any thing else, and D. for 
Domini. 

Just as scholars, quite as clever as they, upon 
finding the word Finis at the end of a book, and 
making dead sure that there could be no meaning in 
Finis, found out that f.i.n.i.s. could mean nothing 
else than Five Jews Nailed Jesus' s Sid'e, as you 
may read it back again, Six Jews Nailed Jesus's 
Feet. 

They found the name of TII5J, in Greek letters, 
the caballistical name of the God Bacchus, set upon 
his altars in letters of gold, surrounded with golden 
rays, and as they looked more like the Roman letters 
IHS than a bull's foot, they concluded that J. stood 
for Jesus, H. for Hominum, and S. for Salvator, 
Jesus the Saviour of Men : while they who had 
heard the name Hues, pronounced I-ES, clapt the 
Latin termination us to it : and I-ES, the name of 
Bacchus, became T,esus. 

So, again, they found the name of the God Jupi- 
ter- Ammon, uttered in low murmurs at the conclusion 
of every prayer in every form of Heliolatry, or Sun- 
worship, used throughout the Pagan world, as Lucan 
assures us: 

Quamvis ^Ethiopum populis Arabumque beatis, 
G-entibus atque Indis, unus sit Jupiter Ammon.' 

^Ethiopians, Arabs, Indians, from Mount Atlas to 
the Ganges, worshipped a common Jupiter Ammon. 
The mystic name of their God Am On, the Everlast- 



THE DEVIL. 97 

ingEire, the Sun, was uttered or placed at the "beginning, 
sometimes, but always at the end of all their works, 
begun, continued, and ended in him, in all the varie- 
ties of expression and intonation, which the utterance 
of so many people, nations, and languages, could give 
it. It was Ammon, Aumen, Armen, Awmen, Omen. 
But not being able to find the meaning of this, the 
Monks contrived to give us the word without any 
meaning at all, except such as is generally sufficient 
to satisfy the curiosity of the faithful. And Ammon, 
you know, means Ammon; or as you have it in the 
catechism for parish apprentices, ' Verily, I say, 
Amen, so be it,' than which nothing in the world 
could be further off the meaning. 

So the same one eternal and only God, considered 
only in his attribute of infinite wisdom, and his all- 
seeing providence : and as to that attribute, typified 
as a Serpent, the most subtle of all creatures, and 
denominated Aith-ain, — Ifirtb, He Sheth-Ain, Satan, 
the fountain of wisdom, has been most monstrously 
taken to be a wholly different and distinct being, as if 
it had not been the same God who made the day who 
also made the night. 

But the Hebrew word &rt* ISTaschesh, and the 
Greek for both, a Dragon and a Serpent, are each 
derived from words which signify the Eye, and refer 
to a peculiar perfection of sight. And in all the lan- 
guages of Asia, the same word expresses the Eye, 
and the Sun, as Milton's Adam addresses the Sun, 
"Thou Sun of this great world — both Eye and Soul." 
And if it should startle us from the ordinary state of 
orthodox stagnation, to discover that God and the 
Devil are better friends than we took them to be, and 
that Satan and the Holy Ghost are but one and the 
self- same being; our second thoughts, and the best 
feelings of rational piety, will, I am sure, admonish 

5 

98 ASTRONOMICO-THEOLOGICAL LECTURES. 

us — how much more worthy of God it is, to be per- 
suaded (if we be persuaded that there is a God at all), 
that he exists in and through all things ; that he 
never had, nor can have, an enemy, either as an op- 
ponent of his will, or a rival of his power. 

But that all the names that have been given to 
him, are but names and personifications of his differ- 
ent supposed attributes, as lovely in Spring, power- 
ful in Summer, benificent in Autumn, and terrible in 
Winter. 

Which is no more than what the more intelligent 
of the Pagan world confessed to be the great secret 
truth, at the bottom of all their Pagan rites. 

Etc Zevg eig Atdrjg eig H/Uoe, etg Aiovvoog, 
Eig Oeog ev Txavreooi : 

One Jupiter, one Pluto, one Sun, one Dio^ysius. 
It is but one and the self-same God in them all. So 
that whatever be the name, God or Devil, Christ or 
Belial, Satan or Holy Ghost, Demon or Angel, Saint 
or Fiend : ' be it a Spirit of Health or Goblin dam- 
ned, — bring with it airs from Heaven, or blasts from 
Hell: be its intents wicked or charitable,' — all are 
but the varied God: they are one and the self-same 
God, who is above all, and through all, and in us all. 

And this is no less than Christians themselves 
(when they would own the truth) have owned, by their 
adoption of that Pagan sentiment: 'Whether shall I 
go from thy spirit, or whether shall I flee from thy 
presence. If I ascend up into Heaven, thou art there : 
if I go down into Hell, thou art there also.' 

We shall no longer wonder that upon that thorough 
understanding of the original meaning and derivative 
sense of words, which is my object in these lectures 
to adduce, that God and the Devil should prove to be 
but one and the self-same being — that is, the same 

THE DEVIL. 99 conceit expressed in different words: when we find 
that the words which we have translated Hell and 
Hell-fire, and the worm that never dieth, and the 
fire that never shall be quenched, are, in the original, 
nothing more than names and titles of the supreme 
God, wrested from their original significancy for the 
convenient purpose of terrifying weak minds, which, 
being but once primed with that most wicked senti- 
ment that ever was in the world — namely, that there 
is no harm in believing — would believe — the gospel ! 

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