2 The Pagan Gods
Because Latin and not Greek literature was for so long the basis of Western education, the pagan gods were known in the Renaissance and subsequently under their Latin names. After the conquest of Greece in the second century BC, Rome gradually began to assimilate Greek culture, and local Roman deities became identified where possible with their Greek counterparts. The table lists the principal gods, the Latin preceding the Greek name, with their associations and activities indicated. (The many lesser gods and demigods are not included.)
The myths of the pagan gods were not enshrined in any sacred canonical books, but were told and retold with many variations in works of literature. In Greek the word myth 
means a story. The earliest Greek sources are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod’s Theogony. Almost all Greek tragedies take the myths of the gods and their dealings with men for their plots, and in these works we find the most serious theological questions being asked: Why do the gods behave as they do? Is their portrayal by human beings accurate? Are they just? Are humans morally better than gods?
The myths are of various kinds. They describe the behaviour of the gods towards one another, their parentage, battles, squabbles and jealousies, their treatment of humans, in particular their championing or victimising of individuals, and their sexual encounters with them. The myths also narrate the adventures of demigods like Hercules, half human, half divine, or of heroes like Achilles the scourge of Troy or Aeneas the founder of Rome. In spite of their immortality, the gods are anthropomorphic in conception; they exhibit human passions and desires, and sometimes act in ways which by human standards would be at best amoral and at worst criminal. They are adulterous, treacherous and murderous. The essence of the relations of the gods with men and with one another is conflict. Man’s place is insecure; he cannot explain why things are as they are. He cannot expect justice. The universe is not ordered morally, or if it is, it is ordered according to a morality he cannot understand.
However, with the growth of philosophic rationalism in Greece from the fifth century BC, the traditional myths came under attack. As the epics of Homer were the basis of Greek education, every Greek was reared on stories of the gods and their immoral activities. Philosophers moving in the direction of monotheism or scientists interested in assigning rational causes to physical phenomena were faced with the problem of the myths. One solution was to attack them outright; in Plato’s Republic II 377–89 (1) Socrates argues that since the gods are neither responsible for evil nor subject to change, poets like Homer who portray them in an unfavourable light should be censored. The philosophical school most hostile to myth was that of Epicurus. The Roman poet Lucretius, who versified Epicurean philosophy for the Latin reading public in his long poem The Nature of the Universe, argued that the gods are utterly removed from the affairs of men and take no interest in them (V ll. 146–73). The other solution, by far the more influential, was to interpret the myths allegorically. Three kinds of allegory were possible, physical, historical and moral.
Physical allegory assumes that the myths were invented to account for natural phenomena; hence the rape of Proserpina is an allegory of the seasons and the growing of corn. This kind of physical allegory was popular among the Stoics. Historical allegory (also known as Euhemerism, after Euhemerus, a Greek of the third century BC who invented it) assumes that the gods were once earthly rulers whose subjects deified them, or benefactors (such as Aesculapius, the god of healing) who taught particular skills. Moral allegory (which turns the gods into personifications of virtues and vices) allows enormous freedom to the interpreter; ostensibly immoral myths can be shown to have moral meanings. This kind of interpretation, which was to have a very long history, was particularly practised by the Neoplatonists. Plato himself used moralised myth of his own invention, and can thus be accused of inconsistency in his attitude to traditional myth.
It is evident that educated but devout Greeks and Romans were faced with a dilemma. On the one hand they regarded naive acceptance of the myths as superstition; on the other they regarded too much allegory as a rationalising of religion which led to atheism. They were particularly conscious of the political importance of religion; to undermine religion would be to undermine the state. The Roman antiquarian Varro distinguished three kinds of theology: mythical (the fictitious tales of the poets, of no religious importance); physical (the rationalisations of the philosophers, which Varro accepted); and civil (the rites of the state religion, which are necessary for public order, but which are based on poetic fiction). Varro’s works do not survive, but are known through Augustine’s detailed analysis in The City of God VI-VII, where the logical difficulties of this scheme are exposed. Two works which beautifully illustrate the confused scepticism, honesty and religious yearnings of the educated pagan are Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods and Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris. The Nature of the Gods is in the form of a dialogue between an Epicurean and a Stoic (2), with comments by a sceptic; Cicero himself is a silent observer who finally commits himself to a belief in divine intervention in human affairs. Isis and Osiris is a detailed examination of the myth of the principal Egyptian gods, its history, cult and meaning (17). Plutarch, hostile to merely physical allegory, emphasises the moral meaning and searches for the unity underlying the diverse myths of different nations (3).
Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire under the Emperor Constantine in AD 324 (the Emperor Julian, known to Christians as the Apostate, failed to bring about a pagan revival a few years later), and pagan forms of worship were finally made illegal in 390 by Theodosius. The myths of the pagan gods were particularly vulnerable to Christian attack, as can be seen in Lactantius’ Divine Institutes I 9–22 and Augustine’s City of God. Partly in response to Christian criticism of pagan cults and myths allegorical interpretations devised centuries earlier were revived. Neoplatonism, in its religious aspect the most serious rival to Christianity in the third and fourth centuries, tried through allegory to make the myths of the gods consistent with monotheism. On the Gods and the World, by Julian’s friend Sallustius, is one of the last of such pagan defences of myth (4).
However, the triumph of Christianity and the abolition of pagan worship by no means implied the end of the pagan gods. In the hostile view, put forward by Origen in Against Celsus, the gods were fallen angels or demons. But every Christian schoolboy in the Roman empire was brought up on classical Latin literature, and hence on the pagan myths. It was impossible for Christianity to ignore pagan culture and pagan educational methods, largely because it could not as yet provide a substitute. Hence some kind of accommodation was necessary. The traditional argument, repeated by Augustine in Christian Instruction II 40 but much older, was that the Christians were entitled to appropriate what was valuable in pagan culture, just as the Israelites had robbed the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35–6). The methods which had been devised to protect the myths from the onslaughts of philosophy and scierice ensured their survival under Christianity. Over the centuries Christianity treated the myths in four ways: in the orthodox view the gods were demons; euhemeristically they were early kings or benefactors, and found their place in Christian chronologies; physically, they were the planets and stars of astrology; and, by far the most important for literature, they were moral allegories of human conduct and foreshadowings of Christian truth. Thus the vocabulary of biblical typology (see Chapter 10) could be stretched to accommodate the pagan gods. The pagans had shown how Homer and Virgil could be moralised; the Christians managed to moralise even intractable authors like Ovid. Thus the fourteenth-century French Ovide moralisé turns the Metamorphoses into a Christian conduct book.
A good deal of knowledge of pagan myths in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance derived not so much from classical sources, of which Ovid was the most important (6, 15), as from handbooks which supplied ready-made interpretation. Such handbooks were used in antiquity; they ranged from straightforward narrative compilations, such as The Library by Apollodorus, to allegorical commentary on particular poets, such as that of Servius on Virgil. The most important early Renaissance handbook was Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. For Boccaccio poetic myth is the shell which encloses the kernel of philosophical and theological truth; it is a view shared by most Renaissance poets who employ myth (see Chapter 12). Boccaccio’s work was extremely influential, but it was in part replaced by three sixteenth-century Italian mythological handbooks: Gyraldus’ The Pagan Gods, Comes’ Mythology and Cartari’s Images of the Gods. The handbooks of Boccaccio, Gyraldus and Comes were in Latin, and hence universally available to the educated reader; Cartari’s Italian text was soon translated. The format used by Comes was particularly helpful to poets; after narrating a myth he gives a detailed interpretation with a Neoplatonic slant (11). These books were widely read and consulted, and in addition the information they provided was drawn on by the authors of popular dictionaries used in schools, such as Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus of Latin and English. In the early seventeenth century English authors began to compile mythological handbooks. Bacon’s The Wisdom of the Ancients is a very idiosyncratic kind of physical allegory: he uses the myths to expound his own scientific theories. Sandys’ commentary on the Metamorphoses is a more traditional compendium of physical, historical and moral interpretation (8, 14). An eccentric but highly illuminating handbook is Alexander Ross’s Mystagogus Poeticus (a mystagogue is an initiator into religious mysteries). Ross briefly relates each myth, then gives a long list of interpretations, physical, historical, moral, political and religious (5, 7, 12). He always concludes with a specifically Christian interpretation; almost all the pagan gods and heroes are seen as types of Christ.
The handbooks were parasitic, each compiler tending to incorporate the work of his predecessor. Since the handbooks ultimately derive from interpretative works of late antiquity in which oriental religion and occult lore were fused with the Greek and Roman tradition, and since Renaissance poets turned to the handbooks more frequently than to the works of classical authors, the gods in Renaissance literature do not necessarily resemble their counterparts in Homer or Virgil or Ovid very closely. But it is not necessary for twentieth-century readers to have recourse to the handbooks to find out why and in what way a Renaissance poet is using myth. The context should tell them. Briefly, five chief uses of myth can be defined. The first is narrative; the story is told for its own sake, unmoralised, as in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (9) and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Marlowe is much truer to the spirit of Ovid than innumerable Christian allegorisers. The second is for embellishment and enrichment of meaning; mythological allusion can serve to aggrandise the subject of a poem (16). However, it can at times clog much late Elizabethan poetry. It was partly against this tradition that Donne reacted; Carew in his ‘Elegy’ on Donne’s death refers to the ‘goodly exiled train/Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just reign/Were banished nobler poems’. The third, and most widespread, is allegorical; this is the method of Spenser in The Faerie Queene (10, Introduction 1), of Jonson in his masques, and Milton in his early poems. Pagan myth both adorns and reveals Christian truth (19). The fourth is mock-heroic; mythological allusion is used to expose the subject of the comparison, though the myth itself is not being criticised. This technique is typical of late seventeenthcentury political satire. The final use is negative and hostile; it draws on the orthodox tradition that the pagan gods were fallen angels and hence forces for evil (18). This method is particularly important in Paradise Lost I and Paradise Regained (13); Milton uses mythological allusion to define Christian truth by contrast with what is pagan and inferior. Satan and his crew are apparently embellished but in fact belittled by their pagan associations.
SOME CLASSICAL ATTITUDES TO THE PAGAN GODS
1 Stories like those of Hera being bound by her son, or of Hephaestus flung from heaven by his father for taking his mother’s part when she was beaten, and all those battles of the gods in Homer, must not be admitted into our state, whether they be allegorical or not. A child cannot distinguish the allegorical sense from the literal, and the ideas he takes in at that age are likely to become indelibly fixed; hence the great importance of seeing that the first stories he hears shall be designed to produce the best possible effect on his character.
Plato Republic II 377
2 The Stoic Balbus summarises his position:
We even think we know the appearance of the gods, their age, their costumes and their fashions! We even claim to know their family histories, their marriages and their relationships to one another, and in every way we reduce them to the stature of our human weakness. We represent them as distracted by our own passions. We are told about their lusts, their griefs and their bad temper. According to the legends they are even plagued by strife and war… These tales are full of frivolous absurdities and both those who tell them and those who listen to them are a pack of fools. But as long as we scorn and reject such fables, we may well believe that a divine power permeates everything in nature, and earth under the name of Ceres, the oceans under the name of Neptune, and so on. So we ought to worship and revere these gods, each in their own person and their own nature, under the names which custom has bestowed upon them. Such worship of the gods is the best of all things, full of purity and holiness and piety, if our reverence is always true and whole and pure in word and thought. It was not only the philosophers but also our own ancestors who thus distinguished between true religion and the follies of superstition.
Cicero The Nature of the Gods II 70–1
3 It is impossible to conceive of [natural objects] as being gods in themselves; for God is not senseless nor inanimate nor subject to human control. As a result of this we have come to regard as gods those who make use of these things and present them to us and provide us with things everlasting and constant. Nor do we think of the gods as different gods among different peoples, nor as barbarian gods and Greek gods, nor as southern and northern gods; but, just as the sun and the moon and the heavens and the earth and the sea are common to all, but are called by different names by different peoples, so for that one rationality which keeps all these things in order and the one providence which watches over them and the ancillary powers that are set over all, there have arisen among different peoples, in accordance with their customs, different honours and appellations. Thus men make use of consecrated symbols, some employing symbols that are obscure, but others those that are clearer, in guiding the intelligence towards things divine, though not without a certain hazard. For some go completely astray and become engulfed in superstition; and others, while they fly from superstition as from a quagmire, on the other hand unwittingly fall, as it were, over a precipice into atheism.
Plutarch Isis and Osiris 377–8
4 Why the myths are divine it is the duty of philosophy to inquire. Since all existing things rejoice in that which is like them and reject that which is unlike, the stories about the gods ought to be like the gods, so that they may both be worthy of the divine essence and make the gods well disposed to those who speak to them: which could only be done by means of myths. Now the myths represent the gods themselves and the goodness of the gods—subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden: since, just as the gods have made the goods of sense common to all, but those of intellect only to the wise, so the myths state the existence of gods to all, but who and what they are only to those who can understand. They also represent the activities of the gods. For one may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good; whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practise philosophy. But why have they put in the myths stories of adultery, robbery, father-binding, and all the other absurdity? Is not that perhaps a thing worthy of admiration, done so that by means of the visible absurdity the soul may immediately feel that the words are veils and believe the truth to be a mystery?
Sallustius On the Gods and the World iii
SOME PAGAN GODS IN CLASSICAL AND RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
(a)
Venus and Adonis
5 He was a beautiful youth, with whom Venus was in love; but whilst he was hunting, he was killed by a boar, or by Mars in the shape of a boar, and by Venus was turned into a red flower called anemone; he was kept after death by Ceres and Proserpina, six months under ground, and other six months by Venus, above.
Alexander Ross Mystagogus Poeticus
6 [Venus] recognised the groans of the dying Adonis from afar, and turned her white birds in his direction. As she looked down from on high she saw him, lying lifeless, his limbs still writhing in his own blood. Leaping down from her car, she tore at her bosom and at her hair, beat her breast with hands never meant for such a use, and reproached the fates. ‘But still,’ she cried, ‘you will not have everything under your absolute sway! There will be an everlasting token of my grief, Adonis. Every year, the scene of your death will be staged anew, and lamented with wailing cries, in imitation of those cries of mine. But your blood will be changed into a flower…’ With these words, she sprinkled Adonis’ blood with sweetsmelling nectar and, at the touch of the liquid, the blood swelled up, just as clear bubbles rise in yellow mud. Within an hour, a flower sprang up, the colour of blood, and in appearance like that of a pomegranate, the fruit which conceals its seeds under a leathery skin. But the enjoyment of this flower is of brief duration: for it is so fragile, its petals so lightly attached, that it quickly falls, shaken from its stem by those same winds that give it its name, anemone.
Ovid Metamorphoses X ll. 719–39
7 Our resurrection in this may be typed out; for although death kill us, it shall not annihilate us, but our beauty shall increase, and we shall spring out of the ground again like a beautiful flower in the resurrection.
Ross Mystagogus Poeticus
8 Adonis is said to be slain by a boar, because that beast is the image of the winter; salvage, horrid, delighting in mire, and feeding on acorns, a fruit which is proper to that season. So the winter wounds, as it were, the sun to death, by diminishing his heat and lustre: whose loss is lamented by Venus, or the widowed earth, then covered with a veil of clouds: springs gushing from thence, the tears of her eyes, in greater abundance: the fields presenting a sad aspect, as being deprived of their ornament. But when the sun returns to the equator, Venus recovers her alacrity; the trees invested with leaves, and the earth with her flowery mantle: wherefore the ancient[s] did dedicate the month of April unto Venus.
George Sandys Ovid’s Metamorphosis X
9 Since thou art dead, lo here I prophesy,
Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:
It shall be waited on with jealousy,
Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end;
Ne’er settled equally, but high or low,
That all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.
It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud;
Bud, and be blasted, in a breathing while;
The bottom poison, and the top o’erstrawed
With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile;
The strongest body shall it make most weak,
Strike the wise dumb, and teach the fool to speak.
It shall be cause of war and dire events,
And set dissension ‘twixt the son and sire;
Subject and servile to all discontents,
As dry combustious matter is to fire.
Sith in his prime death doth my love destroy,
They that love best, their loves shall not enjoy.’
By this the boy that by her side lay killed
Was melted like a vapour from her sight,
And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled,
A purple flower sprung up, checkered with white,
Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood
Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.
Shakespeare Venus and Adonis ll. 1135–46, 1159–70
10 The Garden of Adonis:
There wont fair Venus often to enjoy
Her dead Adonis’ joyous company,
And reap sweet pleasure of the wanton boy:
There yet, some say, in secret he does lie,
Lappèd in flowers and precious spicery,
By her hid from the world, and from the skill
Of Stygian gods, which do her love envy;
But she herself, whenever that she will,
Possesseth him, and of his sweetness takes her fill.
And sooth, it seems, they say; for he may not
For ever die, and ever buried be
In baleful night, where all things are forgot:
All be he subject to mortality,
Yet is eterne in mutability,
And by succession made perpetual,
Transformèd oft, and changed diversely;
For him the father of all forms they call:
Therefore needs mote he live, that living gives to all.
There now he liveth in eternal bliss,
Joying his goddess, and of her enjoyed;
Ne feareth he henceforth that foe of his,
Which with his cruel tusk him deadly cloyed:
For that wild boar, the which him once annoyed,
She firmly hath emprisonèd for ay,
That her sweet love his malice mote avoid,
In a strong rocky cave, which is, they say,
Hewn underneath that mount, that none him loosen may.
Spenser The Faerie Queene III vi stanzas 46–8
(b)
Hercules
(Hercules, also known as Alcides, was the son of Jupiter and Alcmena, a mortal. Most of the myths are concerned with his twelve labours. He killed the giant Antaeus, the son of Earth, by holding him in the air away from his mother’s protection and crushing him. He died by burning himself alive on a funeral pyre on Mount Oeta; he then ascended to Olympus and became a god.)
11 Hercules, who owed his glory to Juno’s hatred, is said to have been the son of Jove and Alcmena; in fact he represents probity, fortitude, and superlative strength of mind and body, which drives out all faults from the mind and destroys them.
Comes Mythologiae VII i
12 Our blessed Saviour is the true Hercules, who was the true and only Son of God, and of the virgin Mary: who was persecuted out of malice, and exposed to all dangers, which he overcame; he subdued the roaring lion, that red dragon, that tyrant and devourer of mankind, the devil; he subdued the Hydra of sin, the Antaeus of earthly affections; he by his word supporteth the world; Satan is that Cacus…that sea monster, from whom by Christ we are delivered; it is he only that went down to hell, and delivered us from thence; he alone travelled through the torrid zone of his Father’s wrath; he purged the Augean stable of Jewish superstition, and heathenish profanation; he overcame the world, and all his enemies, and hath killed the eagle of an evil conscience, which continually fed upon the heart of man; he was that only true…expeller of all evil from us; who with the club of his power, and chains of his eloquence hath subdued and drawn all men after him; who at last was burned but not consumed by the fire of his Father’s wrath.
Ross Mystagogus Poeticus (see also Introduction 1)
13 But Satan smitten with amazement fell As when Earth’s son Antaeus (to compare Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove With Jove’s Alcides, and oft foiled still rose, Receiving from his mother Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joined, Throttled at length in the air, expired and fell; So after many a foil the tempter proud, Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride Fell whence he stood to see his victor fall.
Milton Paradise Regained IV ll. 562–71
14 The moral is more fruitful: Hercules being the symbol of the soul and Antaeus of the body, prudence the essence of the one, and sensual pleasure of the other; between whom there is a perpetual conflict. For the appetite always rebels against reason; nor can reason prevail, unless it so raise the body, and hold it aloft from the contagion of earthly things, that it recover no more force from the same, till desires and affections thereof, which are the sons of the Earth, be altogether suffocated.
Sandys Ovid’s Metamorphosis IX
15 Jupiter addresses the gods:
‘Do not be dismayed by the flames, blazing on Oeta’s heights. Hercules, who conquers all, will conquer the fire you see there: only the human part, which he owes to his mother, will feel Vulcan’s power. What he derives from me is eternal, beyond the reach of death, and not to be overcome by any flames. When that part has fulfilled its time on earth, I shall receive it into the realms of heaven, confident that my action will be a source of rejoicing to all the gods.’… Meanwhile Vulcan had stripped Hercules of whatever fire could ravage, and the form of the hero was left, quite unrecognisable, retaining none of his likeness to his mother, but only the signs of his descent from Jove. Just as a serpent renews its youth, sloughing its old age with its skin, and is left fresh and shining with its new scales, so when the Tirynthian hero had put off his mortal shape, the better part of him grew vigorous, and he began to appear greater than before, a majestic figure of august dignity. Then the omnipotent father swept him through the hollow clouds in his four-horse chariot, and set him among the glittering stars.
Ovid Metamorphoses IX ll. 248–56, 262–72
16 Like a glad lover the fierce flames he meets,
And tries his first embraces in their sheets.
His shape exact, which the bright flames enfold,
Like the sun’s statue stands of burnished gold.
Round the transparent fire about him glows,
As the clear amber on the bee does close.
And as on angels’ heads their glories shine,
His burning locks adorn his face divine.
But when in his immortal mind he felt
His altering form and soldered limbs to melt,
Down on the deck he laid himself and died,
With his dear sword reposing by his side:
And on the flaming plank so rests his head
As one that hugs himself in a warm bed.
The ship burns down and with his relics sinks.
And the sad stream beneath his ashes drinks.
Fortunate boy, if e’er my verse may claim
That matchless grace to propagate thy name,
When Oeta and Alcides [i.e. Hercules] are forgot
Our English youth shall sing the valiant Scot.
Marvell The Loyal Scot: Upon Occasion of the Death of Captain Douglas Burned in One of his Majesty ‘s Ships at Chatham ll. 43–62
(c)
Osiris
(Osiris, the chief Egyptian god, husband of Isis and father of Horus, was murdered by his brother Typhon or Set, dismembered and cast into the Nile. Isis gathered the fragments together. Osiris, who was worshipped as a bull or a crocodile, was identified with Dionysus by the Greeks.)
17 The fact is that the creation and constitution of this world is complex, resulting, as it does, from opposing influences, which, however, are not of equal strength, but the predominance rests with the better. Yet it is impossible for the bad to be completely eradicated, since it is innate, in large amount, in the body and likewise in the soul of the universe, and is always fighting a hard fight against the better. So in the soul intelligence and reason, the ruler and lord of all that is good, is Osiris, and in earth and wind and water and the heavens and stars that which is ordered, established, and healthy, as evidenced by seasons, temperatures, and cycles of revolution, is the efflux of Osiris and his reflected image. But Typhon is that part of the soul which is impressionable, impulsive, irrational and truculent, and of the bodily part the destructible, diseased and disorderly as evidenced by abnormal seasons and temperatures, and by obscurations of the sun and disappearances of the moon, outbursts, as it were, and unruly actions on the part of Typhon… It is not, therefore, out of keeping that they have a legend that the soul of Osiris is everlasting and imperishable, but that his body Typhon oftentimes dismembers and causes to disappear, and that Isis wander hither and yon in her search for it, and fits it together again; for that which really is and is perceptible and good is superior to destruction and change.
Plutarch Isis and Osiris 371, 373
18 Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove, or green,
Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud:
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud,
In vain with timbrelled anthems dark
The sable-stoléd sorcerers bear his worshipped ark.
He feels from Juda’s land
The dreaded infant’s hand, The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside,
Longer dare abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew.
Milton ‘On the Morning Of Christ’s Nativity’ ll. 213–28
(Note that though Milton here disparages the pagan gods he nevertheless identifies the child Jesus with the child Hercules, who strangled snakes in his cradle.)
19 Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all…nor ever shall do, till her Master’s second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.
Milton Areopagitica