This Horus is terminate and complete of himself,
yet hath he not quite destroyed Typhon, but only taken off
his over great activity and brutal force. Whence it is they
tell us that at Copto the statue of Horus holds fast in
hand the privities of Typhon; and they fable that Mercury
took out Typhon's sinews and used them for harp-strings,
to denote unto us that, when reason composed the universe,
[p. 115]
it made one concord out of many discords, and did not
abolish but accomplish1 the corruptible faculty. Whence
it comes that this power, being weak and feeble in the
present state of things, blends and mixes with passible and
mutable parts of the world, and so becomes in the earth
the causer of concussions and shakings, and in the air of
parching droughts and tempestuous winds, as also of hurricanes and thunders. It likewise infects both waters and
winds with pestilential diseases, and runs up and insolently
rages as high as the very moon, suppressing many times
and blackening the lucid part, as the Egyptians believe.
They relate that Typhon one while smote Horus's eye, and
another while plucked it out and swallowed it up, and
afterwards gave it back to the sun; intimating by the blow
the monthly diminution of the moon, and by the blinding
of him its eclipse, which the sun cures again by shining
presently upon it as soon as it hath escaped from the
shadow of the earth.
1 If we adopt Bentley's emendation ἀνεπήρωσε for ἀνεπλήρωσε, we must translate, ‘did not abolish, but merely maimed, the corruptible faculty.’ (G.)
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