THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

dimly known to us, joined in this worship; Syria raised her grand
temples
to the sun; the joyous Greeks sported with the thought while feeling
it,
almost hiding it under the mythic individuality which their lively
fancy
superimposed upon it. Even prosaic China makes offerings to the yellow
orb
of day; the wandering Celts and Teutons held feasts to it, amidst the
primeval forests of Northern Europe; and, with a savagery
characteristic
of the American aborigines, the sun temples of Mexico streamed with
human
blood in honor of the beneficent orb."--_The Castes and Creeds of
India,_
Blackw. Mag., vol. lxxxi. p. 317.--"There is no people whose religion
is
known to us," says the Abbe Banier, "neither in our own continent nor
in
that of America, that has not paid the sun a religious worship, if we
except some inhabitants of the torrid zone, who are continually cursing
the sun for scorching them with his beams."--_Mythology_, lib. iii. ch.
iii.--Macrobius, in his _Saturnalia,_ undertakes to prove that all the
gods of Paganism may be reduced to the sun.
[6] "Varro de religionibus loquens, evidenter dicit, multa esse vera,
quae
vulgo scire non sit utile; multaque, quae tametsi falsa sint, aliter
existimare populum expediat."--St. AUGUSTINE, _De Civil. Dei._--We must
regret, with the learned Valloisin, that the sixteen books of Varro, on
the religious antiquities of the ancients, have been lost; and the
regret
is enhanced by the reflection that they existed until the beginning of
the
fourteenth century, and disappeared only when their preservation for
less
than two centuries more would, by the discovery of printing, have
secured
their perpetuity.
[7] Strabo, Geog., lib. i.
[8] Maurice, Indian Antiquities, vol. ii. p. 297.
[9] Div. Leg., vol. i. b. ii. Sec. iv. p. 193, 10th Lond. edit.
[10] The hidden doctrines of the unity of the Deity and the immortality
of
the soul were taught originally in all the Mysteries, even those of
Cupid
and Bacchus.--WARBURTON, apud Spence's _Anecdotes_, p. 309.
[11] Isoc. Paneg., p. 59.
[12] Apud Arrian. Dissert., lib. iii. c. xxi.
[13] Phaedo.