The Two Babylons

"Laodice, from Cyprus, the divine,

To her paternal wide-extended land,

This veil--an offering to Minerva--sent."

Thus, also, when Hecuba, the Trojan queen, in the instance already referred to, was directed to lead the penitential procession through the streets of Troy to Minerva's temple, she was commanded not to go empty-handed, but to carry along with her, as her most acceptable offering--

"The largest mantle your full wardrobes hold,

Most prized for art, and laboured o'er with gold."

The royal lady punctually obeyed:--

"The Phrygian queen to her rich wardrobe went,

Where treasured odours breathed a costly scent;

There lay the vestures of no vulgar art;

Sidonian maids embroidered every part,

Whom from soft Sydon youthful Paris bore,

With Helen touching on the Tyrian shore.

Here, as the Queen revolved with careful eyes

The various textures and the various dyes,

She chose a veil that shone superior far,

And glowed refulgent as the morning star."

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There is surely a wonderful resemblance here between the piety of the Queen of Troy and that of the Queen of Spain. Now, in ancient Paganism there was a mystery couched under the clothing of the gods. If gods and goddesses were so much pleased by being clothing, it was because there had once been a time in their history when they stood greatly in need of clothing. Yes, it can be distinctly established, as had been already hinted, that ultimately the great god and great goddess of Heathenism, while the facts of their own history were interwoven with their idolatrous system, were worshipped also as incarnations of our great progenitors, whose disastrous fall stripped them of their primeval glory, and made it needful that the hand Divine should cover their nakedness with clothing especially prepared for them. I cannot enter here into an elaborate proof of this point; but let the statement of Herodotus be pondered in regard to the annual ceremony, observed in Egypt, of slaying a ram, and clothing the FATHER OF THE GODS with its skin. Compare this statement with the Divine record in Genesis about the clothing of the "Father of Mankind" in a coat of sheepskin; and after all that we have seen of the deification of dead men, can there be a doubt what it was that was thus annually commemorated? Nimrod himself, when he was cut in pieces, was necessarily stripped. That exposure was identified with the nakedness of Noah, and ultimately with that of Adam. His sufferings were represented as voluntarily undergone for the good of mankind. His nakedness, therefore, and the nakedness of the "Father of the gods," of whom he was an incarnation, was held to be a voluntary humiliation too. When, therefore, his suffering was over, and his humiliation past, the clothing in which he was invested was regarded as a meritorious clothing, available not only for himself, but for all who were initiated in his mysteries. In the sacred rites of the Babylonian god, both the exposure and the clothing that were represented as having taken place, in his own history, were repeated on all his worshippers, in accordance with the statement of Firmicus, that the initiated underwent what their god had undergone. First, after being duly prepared by magic rites and ceremonies, they were ushered, in a state of absolute nudity, into the innermost recesses of the temple. This appears from the following statement of Proclus: "In the most holy of the mysteries, they say that the mystics at first meet with the many-shaped genera[i.e., with evil demons], which are hurled forth before the gods: but on entering the interior parts of the temple, unmoved and guarded by the mystic rites, they genuinely receive in their bosom divine illumination, and, DIVESTED OF THEIR GARMENTS, participate, as they would say, of a divine nature." When the initiated, thus "illuminated" and made partakers of a "divine nature," after being "divested of their garments," were clothed anew, the garments with which they were invested were

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