Such then is the mythology of the Magi. But the
Chaldaeans say, there are Gods of the planets also, two
whereof they style benefics, and two malefics; the other
three they pronounce to be common and indifferent. As
for the Grecians, their opinions are obvious and well
known to every one; to wit, that they make the good
part of the world to appertain to Jupiter Olympius, and the
hateful part to Pluto; and likewise, that they fable Harmonia to have been begotten by Venus and Mars, the one
whereof is rough and quarrelsome, and the other sweet
and generative. In the next place consider we the great
agreement of the philosophers with these people. For
Heraclitus doth in plain and naked terms call war the
father, the king, and the lord of all things; and saith that
Homer, when he first prayed,
Discord be damned from Gods and human race,1
little thought he was then cursing the origination of all
things, they owing their rise to aversation and quarrel.
He also saith, that the sun will never exceed his proper
bounds; and if he should, that
Tongues, aids of justice, soon will find him out.
Empedocles also calls the benefic principle love and friendship, and very often sweet-looked harmony; and the evil
principle
Pernicious enmity and bloody hate.
[p. 109]
The Pythagoreans use a great number of terms as attributes of these two principles; of the good, they use the
unit, the terminate, the permanent, the straight, the odd,
the square, the equal, the dexter, and the lucid; and
again of the bad, the two, the interminate, the fluent, the
crooked, the even, the oblong, the unequal, the sinister,
and the dark; insomuch that all these are looked upon as
principles of generation. But Anaxagoras made but two,
the intelligence and the interminate; and Aristotle called
the first of these form, and the latter privation. But Plato
in many places, as it were shading and veiling over his
opinion, names the first of these opposite principles the
Same, and the second the Other. But in his book of Laws,
when he was now grown old, he affirmed, not in riddles
and emblems but in plain and proper words, that the
world is not moved by one soul, but perhaps by a great
many, but not by fewer than two; the one of which is
beneficent, and the other contrary to it and the author of
things contrary. He also leaves a certain third nature in
the midst between, which is neither without soul nor without reason, nor void of a self-moving power (as some suppose), but rests upon both of the preceding principles, but
yet so as still to affect, desire, and pursue the better of
them; as I shall make out in the ensuing part of this discourse, in which I design to reconcile the theology of the
Egyptians principally with this sort of philosophy.
