236
cynocephalus,[1] and the weasel[2], these being common to the moon; or material forms, such as are seen in sacred animals[3] according to
- ↑ "The Egyptians," says Horapollo, lib. i. "wishing to signify the moon, paint a cynocephalus, because this animal is variously affected by the course of the moon."
- ↑ In the original μυγαλη. "This word," says Gale, "is written variously, viz. as μυγάλη, μυγαλὴ, and μυγαλῆ. It is also variously translated, for it is either rattus, or mus araneus." Plutarch, in the fourth book of his Symposiacs, Quest. 5, says, "that the Egyptians were of opinion that darkness was prior to light, and that the latter was produced from mice in the fifth generation, at the time of the new moon. And further still, they assert that the liver of the weasel diminishes in the wane of the moon.".
- ↑ With the Egyptians many animals were sacred; for the worship of which the following admirable apology is made by Plutarch in his treatise of Isis and Osiris:
"It now remains that we should speak of the utility of these animals to man, and of their symbolical meaning; some of them partaking of one of these only, but many of them of both. It is evident, therefore, that the Egyptians worshiped the ox, the sheep, and the ichneumon, on account of their use and benefit, as the Lemnians did larks, for discovering the eggs of caterpillars and breaking them; and the Thessalians storks, because, as their land produced abundance of serpents, the storks destroyed all of them as soon as they appeared. Hence, also, they enacted a law, that whoever killed a stork should be banished. But the Egyptians honoured the asp, the weasel, and the beetle, in consequence of observing in them certain dark resemblances of the power of the Gods, like that of the sun in drops of water. For at present, many believe and assert that the weasel engenders by the ear, and brings forth by the mouth, being thus an image of the generation of reason [or the productive principle of things]. But the genus of beetles has no female;
