The Most Secret Secrets: Egyptian-Greek Hieroglyphics

only those endowed with the keenest light of mind would suspect anything about them. And thus they devised hieroglyphic letters, allegories, and fables, by which, as if by locks and prisons, they kept and hid the things not to be divulged for as long as they pleased, so that those seeing and hearing would not immediately understand, but would at least have grounds for inquiry. But what evils have arisen from this can hardly be told or believed. For just as we read that a golden chest of wondrous age was sometimes found in the temple of Apollo at Babylon, from which, when it was cut open and opened, such a force of pestilential and most destructive air poured forth that it not only infected and destroyed those who were present with a poisonous and lethal plague, but also raged with pestilential and incredible power, breathing its blight far and wide even upon the Parthians; Or just as in the times of M. Antonius and Verus at Seleucia, when certain soldiers opened a narrow hole—which the Chaldean seers had previously closed—after the temple of Apollo and its image had been plundered and carried off to Rome, such a fatal and most foul vapor emerged that it raged with fury from the borders of the Persians through Syria, all of Greece, and the regions bordering them, even as far as Gaul (as Ammianus Marcellinus and, following him, Cal. Rhod. in book 5, chapter 12, recount), so it happened with the treasures of the Egyptians hidden under their secret wrappings. Having been opened in a manner other than they should have been, they filled all of Greece, and after it the whole world, with superstitions, a multitude of most vain gods, and stupendous deeds. This evil lasted through the whole time of Paganism, until our true Physician of the soul, our SAVIOR, arrived. He provided for the human race with a remedy far different from Hippocrates (who rendered the Athenians immune to that plague by burning the woods), and He utterly ruined and destroyed those Idols of the nations, namely, by the most secret, salvific WORD brought forth from the bosom of the ETERNAL FATHER. Since then, the gods of the nations have long since become cheap and been rejected in the Church and the Christian world as fictitious and vain. But since, nevertheless, as has been said, the many published monuments and books of the Heathens are daily in the hands of the learned, in almost every paragraph of which mention is made of the gods and heroes of the Gentiles, this has provided a cause for the learned to inquire diligently into what was finally understood by those gods and heroes. And some have been found who partly reduced them to history, as if those gods and heroes were kings and men in ancient ages and had performed such holy deeds as are written about them, and partly applied them to the forming of morals or the natural order of this world. But since these people have often brought forward the most absurd things, worthy neither of those first wisest men for concealing nor of themselves for revealing, and have for the greatest part corrupted them with their own inventions, produced without the consensus of things, so that they left more doubt than certainty in the minds of the readers, many have wished that what truly lay beneath those gods and heroes of the Gentiles be deeply explained. For it is certainly credible that a thing of no small weight, proceeding from history, nor one to be dragged toward morals or other matters, existed from the beginning, which kept almost the whole world and so many wise men within it wrapped and blinded not just for a hundred years (which would be too much) but for thirty times a hundred or more, that is, for three thousand years. Meanwhile, among those who treat of chemical matters, some have offered themselves who affirm that the Heathen gods and goddesses produced their first origin from chemical works, among whom were Braceschus, Rob. Vallensis, and some others; but since they adapted the individual things little to their own subjects, and did not render the reason and harmony of all things with a convenient method, and since chemistry itself is held by the judgment of many as empty, futile, and useless, hence nothing certain could be deemed by the learned about these matters. Therefore, I finally took this task upon myself, induced by various reasons: to declare, indeed, and to subject to the eyes of the readers in one treatise what things were originally understood under the gods, goddesses, and heroes of the Gentiles, and in what manner those less fabulous things have been propagated up to this point through the ages; both so that the truth of Christian doctrine, which shines sufficiently by itself, may be illustrated more and more with these shadows removed, and so that Chemistry—not Alchemy (that nurse of so many scoundrels and mother of deceptions, which adulterates metals and does not truly transmute them) but that which serves to produce the Golden Medicine, the Most Ancient and Truest—may be demonstrated,