Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle

other nations, and little by little the entire
Universe was filled with this superstition.

It is also in the books of the Egyptians that the celebrated Maimonides Moses Maimonides, the influential medieval Jewish philosopher tells us he drew all the knowledge and details he gives us regarding Sabism ancient star worship (1), and especially in the books of their agriculture and rural astronomy. For everywhere, worship must have been born from the needs of man and from the feeling of dependence in which he stands to Nature. Thus Egypt can be regarded as the mother of all theogonies genealogies of the gods and the source of the fictions that the Greeks later welcomed and embellished. Indeed, it does not appear that they invented much themselves, as Tatian reproaches them (2); rather, they borrowed everything from the barbarians non-Greeks, specifically the Egyptians and Orientals, who in the time of Plato still worshipped only Nature. Philo of Byblos observed with reason that the Greeks, naturally ingenious, appropriated a part of the cosmogonic fables of the Phoenicians, embellished them, and sometimes even altered them with the marvelous embroidery they added (3). However, the foundation always remained the same, and this foundation could only be Nature, since we proved above that the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, and the Orientals, from whom the Greeks borrowed their religious fables, worshipped only the natural Gods (4): the sun, the stars, and the elements, and generally all the parts of the visible universal cause. In fact, they could give no other worship and other Gods than those they had themselves. Only the names, the attributes of the

(1) The Guide for the Perplexed original: "More. Nevoch.", Part 3, chapter 30, page 425.
(2) Tatian, page 141.
(3) Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel original: "Præp. Ev.", book 1, chapter 10, page 39.
(4) Herodotus, book 2, chapter 5, etc. Iamblichus, On the Egyptian Mysteries original: "de Myst. Ægypt.", chapter 5, section 7.
(5) Herodotus, Euterpe Book 2 of the Histories, chapter 4.

Gods, and the forms of worship were different. Thus, Herodotus does not say that Greece received new Gods from Egypt c, but that it received from there the names and forms of worship (5).

The Egyptians, says this historian,
are those who are considered to have
first imagined the names of the
twelve great Gods, and to have made
them known to the Greeks (6); almost all
the names of the Gods came from
Egypt to Greece. According to my re-
search, I found that they came
from the barbarians and principally from the
Egyptians.

"The Pelasgian the indigenous, pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece hordes who settled in Greece also influenced the worship; but these Pelasgians themselves," remarks Athanasius (7), "had originally drawn their religious ideas and institutions from Egypt."
It appears indeed from Herodotus that the Pelasgians initially honored, through sacrifices, Gods to whom they gave no name or surname, and whom they designated by the general name of Gods (8). Thus the first peoples of Greece, according to Plato (9), called the sun and all the stars they saw in eternal movement "Gods" by a general name. But later the Egyptians brought there, says Herodotus (10), the names of the Gods, and among others that of Bacchus. The Pelasgians went to consult the Oracle of Dodona, the oldest in all Greece, to know if they could adopt these names; and the oracle answered them that they could do nothing better. Consequently, they received all this sacred nomenclature, which then passed to the Greeks. Therefore, the Greeks received from the Egyptians, whether mediately or immediately through the Pelasgians, the different denominations of the adored beings,

(6) Ibid. Euterpe, chapter 50.
(7) Athanasius, Against the Heathen original: "Contra Gentes", page 25.
(8) Herodotus in Euterpe, chapter 5.
(9) Plato, in Cratylus original: "in Cratylo", page 397.
(10) Herodotus in Euterpe, chapter 52.

under the general title of Gods. It was therefore only names, and likely a different form of worship, and not new Gods, that the Greeks received from the Pelasgians and the Egyptians. Indeed, how would the Egyptians—who, as we have seen above, worshipped only the sun, the moon, and the stars, which they regarded as the sole causes of all produced effects—have given new Gods to peoples who also worshipped them, as the passage from Plato proves? The Greeks, for example, already worshipped the sun, but did not know him under the name of Hercules, which he bore in Egypt and Phoenicia, and were entirely ignorant of the sacred fiction of his twelve labors. They were similarly ignorant of his name of Bacchus which the Arabs gave him, and the romantic history of his astronomical travels, modeled on those of the travels of Osiris or of the great deity of the Egyptians, the sun, husband of Isis. These different genealogies, these new names, these feigned adventures, the attributes and images of the stars already worshipped in Greece under the general name of Gods: this is what was new for the Greeks, and what gave their religious ideas and their worship an absolutely new face. We will limit ourselves to the single examples of Bacchus and Hercules, whom we will show derive their origin from a people who never worshipped deified men (1), and who recognized as Gods only Nature and its parts, the sun, the moon, and the stars, as Eusebius says (2).
Herodotus assures us (3) that the worship of Hercules was established in Egypt from the highest antiquity, many centuries before the birth of the alleged son of Alcmene the mother of the Greek hero Hercules; that it is the Greeks who borrowed the name of Hercules from Egypt, and not

(1) Jablonski, Prolegomena, section 9, and chapter 2, sections 12, 18, 21.
(2) Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, book 1, chapters 6 and 9.
(3) Herodotus in Euterpe, chapter 43.
(4) Ibid. chapter 50.

not the Egyptians who copied the Greeks. The worship of Hercules dates back among the Egyptians more than seventeen thousand years. He was among them one of the twelve great Gods, that is to say, one of the Gods whose names the Greeks borrowed from Egypt. This means a God who, by the admission of the same Herodotus (4), was honored with a religious cult by a people who never worshipped heroes; for this is the praise Herodotus gives them. This confirms what we have established, that they worshipped only natural Gods (5).
The same historian attests that he saw an ancient temple of Hercules in Phoenicia, that is, among a people who worshipped only the stars, as Eusebius says (6), and this temple had been built more than two thousand three hundred years before the era fixed for the birth of the Greek Hercules, or rather, the establishment of his worship in Greece. He adds that it then passed to the island of Thasos, where the Phoenician colonies had raised a temple to this same God, and this, more than five generations of men before the century of the alleged son of Alcmene. From this, Herodotus concludes that Hercules is one of the oldest Gods, and that his worship was established in Phoenicia and in Egypt before being established in Greece (7). It is true that he distinguishes two Hercules: one ancient, or a God; the other modern, or a hero. The existence of the first is well demonstrated; that of the second, as a man, is not so clear. We will show elsewhere what this distinction d made by Herodotus is based on, to reconcile the opinion of his century with the result of his research and the testimony of the most learned nations of the Orient; and that the true and first Hercules is the Egyptian Hercules, or the sun, worshipped under this name at Thebes in Egypt.

(5) See Fréret, Defense of Chronology.
(6) See above, page 4.
(7) Herodotus, Euterpe, chapter 14.