How Traditions Become Scriptures
The Most Ancient Form of Worship - The Astronomical Religion, Or the Sunbeam System - Solar and Astral Gods
The shelves of any ordinary sized library could be entirely filled with fragments of literature concerning the worship of the ancients, and the peculiar character of those myths which have been preserved from the remotest days of antiquity, and now underlie all the present systems of theological belief. It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding the vast collection of writings extant on this subject, there is no one compendious and accessible text-book from which the masses generally could derive reliable information and assimilate the knowledge thus widely diffused; and it is no less worthy of observation that, whilst the mythical character of early worship is stamped with unmistakable fidelity upon every form of modern theology, this damaging fact seems to make no difference in the idolatrous veneration with which the modern worshiper clings to the items of his faith; on the contrary, whilst the evidence accumulates around him, that the ideas to which he renders divine homage are paraphrases of ancient fictions, he all the more sturdily battles for his idol, and denounces every attempt to shake the authenticity of legends which he translates into divine revelations.
Perhaps it is for want of an authentic text-book; perhaps because the literature of the subject is too widely diffused and broken up into too many scattered fragments, that this apathy of idolatry prevails so universally, and that the common sense and intelligence of the nineteenth century is contented to bow down with purse and person before lifeless husks from which the spirit has departed; the husks which at best only contained in their original form the spirit of an impersonated myth.