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They asked one another what she could be saying to them with those frightful gestures which accompanied her speech, and mounted round about her on the tables, beds, and sycamore boughs, they strove with open mouths and craned necks to grasp the vague stories hovering before their imaginations, through the dimness of the theogonies, like phantoms wrapped in cloud.
What signifies theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, since whichever side of the problem is man's choice, his God exists not? Let us for a moment take up the first proposition, and suppose God contemporaneous with Matter. Is subjection to the action or the co-existence of an alien substance consistent with being God at all?
It extended from the southeastern part of Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf and the peninsula of Arabia. The people lived in tents, were not ambitious of conquest, were religious and contemplative. The great theogonies of the East came from this people. They studied the stars. They meditated on God and theological questions. They were a chosen race with whom sacred history dwells.
Homer and Hesiod are the great authorities of the theogonies of the pagan world, and we can not tell how much of this was of their invention, and how much was implanted in the common mind of the Greeks, at an age earlier than 700 B.C. The Orphic theogony belongs to a later date, but acquired even greater popular veneration than the Hesiodic.
In all the ancient religions the farther back we go the purer and loftier do we find the popular religion. Belief in supreme deity underlies all the Eastern theogonies, which belief, however, was soon perverted or lost sight of.
Chronos, or time, being measured by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time, the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or life; and so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt.
He had for some years past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work on Pre-Zoroastrian Theogonies, in which, it is to be supposed, Ul-Jabal acted somewhat in the capacity of secretary. But I will give verbatim the extracts from his diary: 'June 11. This is my birthday. Seventy years ago exactly I slid from the belly of the great Dark into this Light and Life. My God!
They contain theogonies, accounts of the creation, philosophical speculations, fragmentary history, and may be brought to support any sectarian view, having never been intended as one general body, but they are received as incontrovertible authority.
This is the dualism which formed the essential element of the Manichean speculations, so congenial to the mystic theogonies of the East, and which was embraced by a portion of the eastern church, especially by those who were fascinated by the refinements and pretensions of a philosophy which aimed to solve the highest problems of existence the nature of God, and the creation of man.
To firmly grasp the Bible for a talisman, as Ulysses did the sprig of moly, and to stand in the Pantheon of the universe, examining every shattered idol and crumbling, denied altar, where worshipping humanity had bowed; to tear the veil from oracles and sibyls, and show the world that the true, good and beautiful of all theogonies and cosmogonies, of every system of religion that had waxed and waned since the gray dawn of time, could be traced to Moses and to Jesus, seemed to her a mission grander far than the conquest of empires, and infinitely more to be desired than the crown and heritage of Solomon.
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