through the mist. The adoration of the Bull of the Zodiac is to be met with every where throughout the world, in the most opposite climes. The examples of it are innumerable and incontrovertible; they admit of no dispute.
6. The reader will not fail to recollect that in our observations on the Cristna of India, some difference between him and Jesus Christ, relating to the immaculate conception, was observed by Mr. Maurice, and laid hold of by him as a point on which he could turn into ridicule the idea of the identity of the two histories of Cristna and Jesus. The life of Pythagoras will shew us where the Christians may have got the particulars which differ from the history of Cristna. The early fathers travelling for information, which was the case with Papias, Hegesippus, Justin, &c., mixed the traditions relating to Pythagoras, which they found spread all over the East, with those relating to the Indian Cristna, and from the two formed their own system. Pythagoras himself having drawn many of his doctrines, &c., from the Indian school, the commixture could scarcely be avoided. Thus we find the few peculiarities respecting the birth of Jesus, such as the immamulate conception, wherein the history of Jesus differs from that of Cristna, exactly copied from the life of Pythagoras. And the circumstances relating to the immaculate conception by the mother of Pythagoras, I have no doubt were taken from the history of Buddha, as I shall shew in my next chapter, and from the virgin of the celestial sphere—herself of Oriental origin. Thus from a number of loose traditions at last came to be formed, by very ignorant and credulous persons, the complete history of the Jesus Christ of the Romish Church, as we now have it. I think no person, however great his credulity may be, will believe that the identity of the immaculate conceptions of Jesus and Pythagoras can he attributed to accident. The circumstances are of so peculiar a nature that it is absolutely impossible. With this system the fact pointed out by the Unitarians is perfectly consistent, that the first two chapters of Matthew and of Luke, which contain the history of the immaculate conception, are of a different school from the remainder of the history.
The first striking circumstance in which the history of Pythagoras agrees with the history of Jesus is, that they were natives of nearly the same country; the former being born at Sidon, the latter at Bethlehem, both in Syria. The father of Pythagoras, as well as the father of Jesus, was prophetically informed that his wife should bring forth a son, who should be a benefactor to mankind. They were both born when their mothers were from home on journeys: Joseph and his wife having gone up to Bethlehem to be taxed, and the father of Pythagoras having travelled from Samos, his residence, to Sidon, about his mercantile concerns. Pythais, the mother of Pythagoras, had a connexion with an Apolloniacal spectre, or ghost, of the God Apollo, or God Sol, (of course this must have been a holy ghost, and here we have the Holy Ghost,) which afterward appeared to her husband, and told him that he must have no connexion with his wife during her pregnancy—a story evidently the same as that relating to Joseph and Mary. From these peculiar circumstances, Pythagoras was known by the same identical title as Jesus, namely, the Son of God; and was supposed by the multitude to be under the influence of Divine inspiration.
When young, he was of a very grave deportment, and was celebrated for his philosophical appearance and wisdom. He wore his hair long, after the manner of the Nazarites, whence he was called the long-haired Samian. And I have no doubt that he was a Nazarite for the term of his natural life, and the person called his daughter was only a person figuratively so called.
He spent many years of his youth in Egypt, where he was instructed in the secret learning of the priests, as Jesus, in the Apocryphal Gospels, is said to have been, and was carried thence to Babylon by Cambyses, the iconoclast and restorer of the Jewish religion and temple, where he was initiated into the doctrines of the Persian Magi. Thence he went to India, where he learned the doctrines of the Brahmins. Before he went to Egypt he spent some time at Sidon, Tyre, and
