The Most Secret Secrets: Egyptian-Greek Hieroglyphics

The same judgment will apply to the other Heathen authors and their writings. But we Christians have long since rejected, mocked, and spurned that multitude of gods, being instructed by the truth of the Word of God. What, therefore, shall we say about the deeds of so many gods and heroes? Are these to be considered possible and true, since their authors were neither gods nor true? Or shall we refute and reject the gods, yet nonetheless admit and receive their deeds and offspring? Or shall we pronounce these as false along with them, and claim there is no truth in either among all the authors? It is a wonder that no one among the thousands of Christian writers has been concerned about this, even though the declaration of these difficulties is so necessary that hardly any writing, either political or theosophical, could be offered to the world that is more useful after the Holy Scriptures. The reason for this is that these things appear not only most ancient and stored beyond all memory of writers, but also most secret, because they have always been held toward their true origin and have been known to very few. For those things ought by right to be considered most ancient and at the same time MOST SECRET, which for so many ages of the world—more than three thousand years, from the first authors down to our own times—have been covered and hidden like a treasure most secretly enclosed in a chest. Concerning these, although Heathen writers have evolved some things, albeit fabulously—that is, according to their own capacity—they called them mysteries, as is evident from the inscription of the books of Eumolpus, Menander, Melanthy, Iamblichus, Evanth, and others who contain nothing but poetic fables and do not explain even the tip of the truth of them, for the reason that they understood that great and mystical things lay hidden under these inventions, containing more in reality in their recesses than they promised at first sight. For the ancient Egyptians, the wisest of men (from whom, if we trace the first origin, we will notice that all these things were propagated), when they had attained the most precious things by the gift of God and their own labor, which they did not want to be entirely unknown to posterity, nor yet equally known to everyone, they found a way of obscuring them and enveloping them, as it were, in certain shadows, so that