To the Readers

...unless endowed with the sharpest light of the mind, they might suspect anything of them; and thus they devised hieroglyphic letters, allegories, and fables, in which, as if in cloisters and prisons, they contained and hid matters not to be made public for as long as they pleased, so that those seeing and hearing would not immediately understand, but would at least have reason to inquire. Truly, how much evil has arisen from this can scarcely be said or believed: For just as we read that in Babylonia, in the temple of Apollo, a golden casket of wonderful antiquity was once discovered, from which, when it was broken and opened, such a force of pestilential and most destructive air poured forth, that its blast not only finished off those who were present, infected by a poisonous and lethal stain, but spreading with pestilential and incredible power, it even afflicted the Parthians far and wide; Or as in the times of Marcus Antonius Maier likely refers to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Verus at Seleucia, when certain soldiers opened a narrow hole—which the priests original: "vates" of the Chaldeans An ancient people of Mesopotamia famous for astronomy and occult wisdom. had previously closed—after the temple of Apollo had been plundered and his image moved to Rome, such a fatal and foul vapor emerged that it raged violently from the borders of the Persians through Syria, all of Greece, and its neighboring regions even to Gaul (as Ammianus Marcellinus and from him Caelius Rhodiginus Ludovico Ricchieri, a Renaissance scholar known by his Latin name Calvisius Rhodiginus. in book 5, chapter 12, recount,) so it happened with the treasures of the Egyptians hidden under their secret coverings, that when opened otherwise than was proper, they filled all Greece, and after it the whole world, with superstitions, a multitude of most vain gods, and astonishing deeds: This evil lasted throughout the entire time of Paganism, until the true Physician of the soul, our SAVIOR, arrived, who provided for the human race with a far different remedy than Hippocrates (who rendered the Athenians immune from that plague by burning forests) and utterly ruined and destroyed those idols of the nations, namely by the most secret, saving WORD brought forth from the bosom of the ETERNAL FATHER: Since then, the gods of the nations in the Church and the Christian world have long been cheapened and rejected as fictitious and vain. But since nevertheless, as has been said, so many monuments and books of the Pagans original: "Ethnicorum" are published daily...