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Show 10 EGYPTIAN COSMOGONY. whole human race, and annihilates all the ~nimal and veget~ble productions of nature; and the Ecpyros1s, or confl~grat10n, which dissolves the globe itself. From the Egyptians also they derived the doetrine of the gradual debas.eme.nt of man from a state of innocence. Towards the termmatlon of each era the gods could no longer bear with the wickedness of men, and a shock of the elements or a deluge overwhelmed them ; after which calamity, Astrea again descended on the earth, to renew the golden age *. . . The connexion between the doctrme of successive catastro-phes and repeated deteriorations in the moral cl~aracter of the human race is more intimate and natural than mtght at first be imagined. 'For, in a rude state of society, all great calam~ties are recrarded by the people, as judgments of God on the wtckednes: of man. Thus, in our own time, the priests persuaded a large part of the population of Chili, and perhaps be.lieved themselves, that th'e great earthquake of 18flfl was a sign of the wrath of heaven for the great political revolution just then consummated in South America. In like manner, in the account given to Solon by the Egyptian priests, of the submer-. sion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that .the event.hap· pened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity of the mhabitants t. Now, when the notion had once gained gt·ound, whether from causes before suggested or not, that the earth had been destroyed by several general catastrophes, it would next be inferred that the human race had been as often destroyed and renovated. And, since evet·y extermination was assumed to be penal, it could only be reconciled with divine justice, by the supposition that man, at each successive creation, was regenerated in a state of purity and innocence. A very large portion of Asia, inhabited by the earliest nations whose traditions have come down to us, has been always subject to tremendous earthquakes. Of the geographical boul}daries of these, and their effects, we shall, in the proper place, have occasion to speak. Egypt has, for the most part, been exempt from this scourge, and the tra- • Pdchard's Egypt. Mythol. p. 193. t Plato's Timreus. EGYPTIAN COSMOGONY. 11 clition of catastrophes in that country was perhaps derived from the East. One extraordinary fiction of the Egyptian mythology was the supposed intervention of a masculo-feminine principle, to which was assigned the development of the embryo world, somewhat in the way of incubation. For the doctrine was, that when the first chaotic mass had been produced, in the form of an egg, by a self-dependent and eternal Being, it required the mysterious functions of this masculo-feminine demi-urgus to reduce the component elements into organized forms. Although it is scarcely possible to recall to mind this conceit without smiling, it does not seem to differ essentially in principle from some cosmological notions of men of great genius and science in modern Europe. The E~yptian philosophers ventured on the perilous task of seeking out some analogy to the mode of operation employed by the Author of Nature in the first creation of organized beings, and they compared it to that which governs the birth of new individuals by generation. To suppose that some general rules might be obsen·ed in the first origin of created beings, or the first introduction of new species into our system, was not absurd, nor inconsistent with anything known to us in the economy of the universe. But the hypothesis, that there was any analogy between such laws, and those employed in the continual reproduction of species once created, was purely gratuitous. In like manner, it is not unreasonable or derogatory to the attributes of Omnipotence, to imagine that some general laws may be observed in the creation of new worlds; and if man could witness the birth of such worlds, he might reason by induction upon the origin of his own. But in the absence of such data, an attempt has been made to fancy some analogy between the agents now employed to destroy, renovate, and perpetually vary the earth ,s surface, and those whereby the first chaotic mass was formed, and brought by supposed nascent energy from the embryo to the habitable state. By how many shades the elaborate systems, constructed on these principles, may differ from the mysteries of the" Mundane Egg'' of Egyptian fable, we shall not inquire. It would, perhaps, be dangerous ground, and some of our contemporaries might not sit as patiently as the Athenian audience, when the fiction of the |