To the Reader.

Just as the mad Pentheus sees the ranks of the Furies,
And a double sun, and a double Thebes revealing themselves.
original: Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus, Et solem geminum, & duplices se ostendere Thebas.

As Pentheus the mythological King of Thebes mentioned on the previous page, amazed, spies whole troops of Furies,
Two suns and two versions of Thebes are presented to his eyes.

Now this fable, as Lord Bacon Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an influential philosopher and scientist who interpreted classical myths in his work The Wisdom of the Ancients tells us, relates to divine secrets. This is because those who forget their frail mortality and rashly aspire to understand divine mysteries through ambitious leaps in the study of nature and philosophy—as though they were climbing a tree—suffer a specific punishment. They are perplexed by a perpetual inconsistency and wavering in judgment. Because the light of nature is one thing and the divine light is another, it happens to them as though they saw two suns. And since the actions of life and the decrees of the will