1nCnVqgFI

THE EGYPTIAN CAT-SYMBOI.. 323
making puzzles or riddles. . . . They had observed the simple fact that the cat
saw in the dark, and that her eyes became full-orbed, and grew most luminous by
night. The moon was the seer by night in heaven, and the cat was its equivalent
on the earth; and so the familiar cat was adopted as a representative, a natural
sign, a living pictograph of the lunar orb. . . . And so it followed that the sun
which saw down in the under-world at night could also be called the cat, as it was,
because it also saw in the dark. The name of the cat in Egyptian is mau, which
denotes the seer, from luau, to see. One writer on mythology asserts that the
E'O'ptiaus "imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the pupil of the cat's
eve." But this imagining is all modern. It is the Miillerite stock in trade. The
moon, as cat, was the eye of the sun, because it reflected the solar light, and because
the eye gives back the image in its mirror.
In the form of the goddess Pasht, the
cat keeps watch for the sun, vidth her paw holding down and bruising the head of
the serpent of darkness, called his eternal enemy!
This is a very correct exposition of the lunar mythos from its
astronomical aspect. Selenography, however, is the least esoteric of
the divisions of lunar Symbology. To master thoroughly— if one is
permitted to coin a new word—Selenognosis, one must become proficient
in more than its astronomical meaning. The Moon is intimately
related to the Earth, as shown in the Stanzas, and is more
directly concerned with all the mysteries of our Globe than is even
Venus-Ivucifer, the occult sister and alter ego of the Earth.*
The untiring researches of Western, especially German, symbologists,
during the last and the present centuries, have induced the most unprejudiced
students, and of course every Occultist, to see that without
the help of symbology—with its .seven departments, of which the
moderns know nothing—no ancient Scripture can ever be correctly
understood. Symbology must be studied from every one of its aspects,
for each nation had its own peculiar methods of expres.sion. In short,
no Eg}'ptian papyrus, no Indian oUa, no Assyrian tile, no Hebrew
scroll, should be read and interpreted literally.
This ever>^ scholar now knows. The able lectures of Mr. Gerald
Massey alone are sufl&cient to convince any fair-minded Christian that
to accept the dead-letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a
grosser error
and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain
of the savage South Sea Islander. But the fact to which even the
most truth-loving and truth-searching Orientalists—whether Arj^anists
or Egyptologists—seem to remain blind, is that every symbol on
papyrus or olla is a many-faced diamond, each of whose facets not only
includes several interpretations, but also relates to several sciences.
• See Section VII, " Deus Lunus."