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388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
try. The other was sacred to the Moon, because the latter planet is
white and brilliant on her external side, dark and black on that side
which she never turns to the Ii)arth. Moreover, the Ibis kills land
serpents, and makes the most terrible havoc amongst the eggs of the
crocodile, and thus saves Egypt from having the Nile over-infested by
those horrible saurians. The bird is credited with doing this in the
moonlight, and thus being helped by Isis, whose sidereal symbol is the
Moon. But the more correct esoteric truth underlying these popular
myths is, that Hermes, as shown by Abenephius,* watched over the
Egyptians under the form of that bird, and taught them the Occult
arts and sciences. This simply means that the ibis religiosa had, and
has, "magical" properties in common with many other birds, the albatross
preeminently, and the mythical white swan, the Swan of Eternity
or Time, the Kalahansa.
Were it otherwise, indeed, why should all the ancient peoples, who
were no more fools than we are, have had such a superstitious dread of
killing certain birds In Egj^pt, he who killed an Ibis, or the Golden
Hawk, the symbol of the Sun and Osiris, risked death, and could hardly
escape it. The veneration of some nations for birds was such that
Zoroaster, in his precepts, forbids their slaughter as a heinous crime.
In our age, we laugh at every kind of divination.
Yet why should so
many generations have believed in divination by birds, and even in
Oomancy, which is said b}^ Suidas to have been imparted by Orpheus,
who taught how, under certain conditions, to perceive in the yolk and
white of an ^%%, that which the bird born from it would have seen
around it during its short life. This Occult art, which, 3,000 years ago,
demanded the greatest learning and the most abstruse mathematical
calculations, has now fallen into the depths of degradation ;
and to-day
it is the old cooks and fortune-tellers who read the future for servantgirls
in search of husbands, from the white of an Q.%