The first month, say they, answers to the lamb, the second to the bull, the third to the twins, &c. It is under the six first signs, or under the six first months of the equinoxial year, that they celebrate the reign of the beneficent Deity, or the principle of light; and it is under the other six signs that they place the action of the malevolent Devil, or the principle of darkness; and it is at the seventh sign, answering to the balance, or the first of the autumnal signs, the season of fruits, when the colds of winter penetrate in our hemisphere, that they say, commenced the reign or empire of darkness

and of evil.

The reader will remark, that it is after the season of fruits that the genius of evil, according to the cosmogony of the Persians, spreads in the world his fatal and most terrible influence, covering one half of the globe as with a veil of mourning, converting its fluids into solids, and making of these one stiffened heap-disorganizing the plants, &c. It is then that man discovers the evils of which he was ignorant during the spring and the summer, in the delicious climates of the northern hemisphere.

The supreme God, according to the writer of the Modinel el Tawarik, in the beginning created man and the bull in an elevated place, where they remained three thousand years without evil. These thousands of years included the lamb, the bull, and the twins. They then remained yet three thousand more years upon the earth without enduring pain or contradiction, and these three thousands answer to the cancer or crab, the lion, and the virgin. Here then, we have the six thousands spoken of above, under the name of thousands of Gods, and the zodiacal signs affected to God, or the good principle,

After that, at the seventh sign, answering to the balance, evil appeared, and man commenced to till the soil, or, in the language of Genesis, the curse was pronounced; (chap. 3, v. 19) "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

In another part of the Persian cosmogony it is said, that all the duration of the world, from its commencement to its termination, has been fixed at twelve thousand years; that man on the superior portion of the globe, that is to say, in the northern and superior hemisphere, lived without evil for three thousand years. He was without evil for yet another three thousand years, when Ahrimanes, or the spirit of evil, appeared, who drew all sorts of evils and wars

and pestilence in the seventh thousand, that is to say, under the sign of the balance, upon which is placed the celestial serpent. Then was produced the mixture of good and evil, of happiness and misery.

Man had thus far been favored by the Deity, as written (chap. 1, v. 28) " And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Man was then good, not having plucked the fatal apple, (chap. 1, v. 31) "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day." But, in the season of fruits, when the wily serpent, or serpent of evil, introduced cold, sin, and death into the world—or when in the mystical language of Genesis, (chap. 3, v. 22)" And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil," &c. "Therefore, (chap. 3, v. 23, 24) the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden, Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."--Or in the language of the Persian allegorists, Ormusd had loaded man with all sorts of delights; but the god Ormusd had a wily rival in Ahrimanes, the prince of darkness, the most determined enemy to man, who poisoned the most precious of Ormusd's gifts; and to this chief of darkness man became the victim, at the moment when the Sun, or Ormusd, the great god of Day, retreats towards the southern climates. These long nights re-take their terrible empire, and the murderous breath of Ahrimanes, who appears under the form, or under the ascendant of the serpent of the constellations, carries devastation and misery into that Paradise, or garden of delights, in which Ormusd had placed man. Here then, we have the theological idea that the author of Genesis has taken from the cosmogony of the Persians. The idea is precisely the same, but the manner of setting it forth is agreeable to the different kind of genius of the two people. Whether the Persians were indebted for the idea to the people of any more ancient but now forgotten nation, cannot, perhaps, be satisfactorily determined; but it is certain, that the Hebrew books of Genesis is a mere copy, as regards the idea of the Boundesh, or Genesis of the Magi or Persian priests.

From what has been written, the conclusion is inevitable, that the evil introduced into the world is winter, and who from such evil

will be the Redeemer ?-who, but the god of Spring, or the god Sun, in his passage under the sign of the Lamb, of whom Christ, the god worshipped by Christians, assumes all the forms, for he is the Lamb who repairs all the evils of the world, evils that the serpent introduced so subtilly in the garden of Paradise; and it is under the emblem of the Lamb that Christ is represented in the monuments of the first Christians.

It must be evident, that the whole story about the fall of man, relates to the periodical physical evil, of which every year the earth is the theatre, in consequence of the retreat of the Sun-that great source of life and light to all that breathes, moves, and has a being upon the surface of this globe. That cosmogonic tale is nothing more than an allegorical picture of the general phenomena of nature, and the particular influence of the celestial signs; for the serpent, or the great adder, the cause of sin and death, is the serpent of winter, which, as the Balance (one of the constellations) is placed upon the limits, or boundary-line, separating the empires of the two principles-in other words, upon the autumnal equinox. Here, we have the true serpent, of which Ahrimanes takes the form in the fable of the Magi, as in the fable of the Jews, to introduce evil into the world; also, the Persians call that malevolent genius, the Serpent Star, and the celestial serpent, the Serpent of Eve. The following is from the Boundesh or Genesis of the Persians, "Ahrimanes, or the principle of darkness and of evil, that power by whom sin comes into the world, is seen in the sky, under the form of a great adder, accompanied by all kinds of evils and bad geniuses, who search only to destroy." It also observes, "When bad geniuses desolate the world, and that the serpent star marks out for itself a course between the sky and the earth, that is to say, mounts upon the horizon," &c.

Now, the epoch of the annual revolution of the celestial serpent, when united to the Sun, he mounts upon the horizon with that star, is, when the Sun'arrives at the Balance, where the constellation of the serpent extends itself, that is, at the seventh sign, setting out from the Lamb, or that sign under which it has been shewn, the Magi fixed the commencement of the reign of the bad principle, and the origin of evil in the universe.

In the Hebrew Genesis the same expressions are not employed as in that of the Persians; but the Genesis of the ancient Tuscans is, in all the rest, conceived in precisely the same terms as that of the Hebrews, and has conserved that allegorical division of time

spoken of in the Persian Genesis, during the which, the powerful action of the Sun, or soul of nature, is exercised. In the books of the ancient Tuscans it is thus expressed:

"The God, Architect of the Universe, has employed and consecrated twelve thousand years to the works that he has produced; and he has divided them in twelve times, distributed in the twelve signs, or houses of the Sun. During the first thousand, he made the sky and the earth. During the second, the firmament that he called the sky. During the third, he made the sea and the waters, which flow upon and through the earth. During the fourth, he made the two great lights of nature. During the fifth, he made the souls of birds, of reptiles, quadrupeds, and all animals which live in the air, upon the earth, and in the waters. During the sixth, he made man.” "It seems (adds the author) that the first six thousand years having preceded the formation of man, the human race should subsist for the other six thousand years;" so that all the time, from the commencement to the consummation of that great work, may be enclosed within a period of twelve thousand years.

If the Christian doctors who argue so profoundly against the validity of argumentation, when religion is in question, who are wonderfully industrious in shewing reasons why reason should not be used-if the fathers of the church, who were nothing less than philosophers, could not, with all their disposition to believe, swallow and digest such gross absurdities, nor explain the book of Genesis without recurring to allegory-if nought but the key of allegory could open the closet where the true sense of Scripture lay concealed-if they found that to interpret literally was to shock reason and cover the Sacred Books with ridicule,—surely it will be permitted to us, who, living in an age boasting of its enlightenment, and feeling that it is better and nobler that men should be good reasoners rather than good believers, to shew the true character of such marvellous histories-give to them their true interpretation, and raise or tear aside the veil of allegory which conceals their moral beauty. Yes, let us follow in the footsteps of Origines, one of the most learned writers of whom the Christians can boast, who boldly declares the book of Genesis to be a book of absurdities— when literally interpreted, or when read by those who do not, or cannot, understand that there is a hidden and a revealed meaning in Scriptural passages—a literal and a figurative sense. That doctor, after ridiculing the idea that the tree of life in the garden of Paradise was a real sensible tree, which had the virtue of conser

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ving life, &c., continues, and compares the fable of the temptation of Adam to the fable related about the birth of love, who, it is related, had for his father, Porus or abundance, and poverty for his mother, he sustains that a very large portion of the Old Testament is fabulous-that what is there related to have taken place, could not by possibility have happened, and are therefore nothing more than fictions which conceal certain secret truths.

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As to those who are content to acknowledge in Christ a Redeemer God, and yet cannot believe in the adventure of Adam and Eve, the serpent, the wonderful tree, and the fall of man, which alone gave birth to the necessity of a Redeemer, we charge them with inconsistency, and cannot see by what means they can escape or rebut the charge. If no fault was committed by Adam-if there never was a Paradise, or a talking serpent, or a real tree of good and evil-how could the Lord God have driven Adam out of a garden which never existed?—or how should he put enmity between the serpent and the woman, if no such serpent existed ?—or how should he inflict misery and death, as a punishment of the human race, in consequence of the sin of Adam and Eve-if Adam and Eve were not real personages? If the facts were not as the text of Genesis announces, what confidence can be placed in 'an author who deceives in his very first page, and an author, too, whose work serves as a basis to the religion of the Christians? Verily, the religion built upon such a foundation must be unstable indeed! If those who support old orthodoxy are reduced to the necessity of acknowledging that there is a concealed sense, they will be compelled to recur to allegory, and we desire no more; it is indeed the only crime that Christians can charge us with. All that will then remain for theological critics to do, is simply to shew by sound argument and calm reasoning, that though an allegorical explication is necessary, yet that ours is not the true one,—and we have no wish to escape behind the text, "Judge not lest ye be judged"—as we freely judge, we desire to be judged by those who have well considered the whole subject, and are competent to the task; for we are far from desiring that our readers should have faith in, when they should rather freely canvass, our opinions. Texts have been cited-facts carefully collected-the phenomena of the heavens, and the origin of all systems of religion, searched into,-let those who can, and dare, bring forth other texts-other facts-explaining better the phenomena of the heavens, and shew that religions could have had any other origin than human igno

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