THE ARGUMENT OF THE OBELISK,

And concerning the primeval origin of hieroglyphs, confirmed by the testimonies of Oriental authors.

THIS Obelisk was consecrated by the Egyptians to the supreme Genius, whom they called the Spirit or Soul of the World, and whom they believed had fixed his seat in the Sun, and whom they addressed now as Hemphta, now as Baieth, and at other times as Osiris, by Egyptian names. They named him Hemphta when they indicated the presiding Genius of the Intellectual World; they called him Baieth when they pointed to the Genius of the Sidereal World residing in the Sun; in the Egyptian tongue this was said to be Bai eth, the Heart of Life, because the Sun was the Heart of the life of all things. When, however, they intended to indicate the President of the elemental World, they called him Busiris, or Serapis.

Thus, in order to express this Genius with an appropriate symbol, they chose the figure of an Obelisk as most fitting, tapering on its four sides to a final point; these figures they called, in Egyptian, the fingers of the Sun, so that by the tapering masses of such obelisks they might aptly signify the influx of the spirit of the World, or the Solar Genius, into the four parts of the World; by which they believed all things to be animated, all things to be conserved, and furthermore that the abundance and fruitfulness of all things necessary for life were granted.

Because, however, this Soul of the World would sometimes—on account of the neglect of sacred rites and irreverence toward the Divinity—press upon Egypt as if indignant with a great slaughter of sterility and other calamities; the priests, for the sake of propitiating the Divinity, instituted sacrifices, by which, through various rites and ceremonies and symbols aptly constituted according to the properties of the Divinity, which they carved onto the Obelisks, they strove to appease him; and they persuaded themselves that these were of such efficacy and virtue that they hoped there was nothing they could not obtain from him, as if attracted and enticed by a certain violence by these symbols consonant with the nature of the Genius.

But that these hieroglyphic inscriptions indicated nothing other than what we have stated, I have thought must be proven from the most ancient authors; for that this symbolic mode of writing was invented by Hermes Trismegistus, and utilized by the ancient sages, will be clearly evident from the following testimonies of the Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews, and Arabs.

WHAT they delivered in their mystical Theology dictated by Plato, and published by Aristotle after the death of his Master—which was later found in the Damascene Library and translated by Franciscus Roseus of Ravenna, in a rough style, first from Arabic into Italian, and from this by Petrus Nicolaus Castellanius into