Essay on the Sacred Fire and on the Vestals

or approximately until the time of Abraham; the 600 years added to this number by the Samaritan Pentateuch The first five books of the Hebrew Bible as preserved by the Samaritans, which contains different chronological calculations than the standard Masoretic text., and the 800 years of the Septuagint The Greek translation of the Old Testament, which also offers a different timeline for the early patriarchs. perhaps remove this difficulty; but everything that can be said on this subject is reduced to mere conjecture. It is the same with the beginnings of all things; the more remote the times, the more limited our insights; one is forced to imagine, and this path rarely leads to the truth. We must be content with probabilities; it is in the progress of the human spirit that we must seek them. We are dealing here with errors and superstitions; revealed mysteries do not make them known to us. Let us therefore consider for a moment man abandoned to himself, cast here and there upon this globe, occupied with the cares of his subsistence, and casting his gaze only upon the objects that surround him.

As long as the human race was few in number, the heads of families were the only sacrificers. When it had multiplied, its needs and its labors increased; it neglected worship and the cares it requires. Often several households united to pray together; a single Pontiff term: Pontiff (from the Latin pontifex), here used generally to mean a high priest or chief religious leader. sufficed for them all. Some elders did not care to fulfill these functions; they were left to the one at whose house the people gathered. Thus, fathers insensibly stripped themselves of the right to present to the Divinity their vows and those of their children. He who had first taken charge of the sacrifices transmitted this office to his descendants; the Nation

accustomed itself by degrees to seeing it in the hands of a few. It is perhaps in this manner that the Priesthood was established, which in time took on a more constant and regulated form.

The altars built by the ancestors of the small tribe still existed; tradition did not fail to recall some wonders performed in the places where they were erected, and consequently made them an object of veneration. They sacrificed on these altars rather than on new ones; superstition imagined that the Divinity inhabited them by preference. The Sacrificers could not always be wise men; they saw how much ignorance increased their credit; there were undoubtedly ambitious ones among them who thought to maintain the one by the other. Prodigies were supposed; errors were multiplied; the miracles, of which the memory had been preserved, provided models to imitate, opened a vast field to the imagination, and undoubtedly disposed minds toward credulity. All true notions were soon stifled. Nature presents a thousand phenomena capable of frightening those who do not know its laws. Men who wish to deceive are not usually the most credulous; they observe with attention and take advantage of their discoveries.

It is fear that makes the deepest impressions on minds. One easily becomes accustomed to benefits: one enjoys them without thinking of the hand from which they come. Terror, once

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