Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans

Franz Cumont

9 chapters · about 3 h

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The opening

LECTURE I THE CHALDEANS

THE CHALDEANS

r^URING the period of the French Revolution citizen Dupuis, in three bulky volumes “On the Origin of all Forms of Worship” (1794), developed the idea that the primary source of religion was the spectacle of celestial phenomena and the ascertainment of their correspondence with earthly events, and he imdertook to show that the myths of all peoples and all times were nothing but a set of astronomical combinations. According to him, the Egyptians, to whom he assigned the foremost place among “the inventors of religions, “had conceived, some twelve or fifteen thousand years before our era, the division of the ecliptic into twelve constellations corresponding to the twelve months; and when the expedition of Bonaparte discovered in the temples of the Nile valley, notably at Denderah, some zodiacs to which a fabulous antiquity was attributed, these extraordinary theories appeared to receive an unexpected confirmation. But the bold mythological fabric reared in the heavens by the savant of the Revolution fell to pieces when Letronne proved that the zodiac of Denderah dated, not from an epoch anterior to the most ancient of the known Pharaohs, but from that of the Roman emperors.

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The words
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  • Page numbers and running heads from the printed pages, in 223 places
  • Other material that isn't the author's, in 5 places
  • Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers, in 3 places
  • The title page and opening pages before chapter 1
  • The copyright page ('ComacHT, xQxa BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS', as the OCR reads it) (4 blocks)
  • The half-title lines above Lecture I ('Astrology and Religion / Among the Greeks and Romans') (2 blocks)
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