Of idolatry a discourse, in which is endeavoured a declaration of, its distinction from superstition, its notion, cause, commencement, and progress, its practice charged on Gentiles, Jews, Mahometans, Gnosticks, Manichees Arians, Socinians, Romanists : as also, of the means which God hath vouchsafed towards the cure of it by the Shechinah of His Son / by Tho. Tenison ...

PART 11. Of the Idols Apis and Mnevis, and the Commencement of their Worship.

Now in answer to the last Query, I am to say something about the time of the division of this Symbol of the Ox. Egypt, as a learned a 1.1 man ob∣serveth, was of old divided into two parts, the upper and the lower, of which the first (he saith) had Mem∣phis, the other Heliopolis for its chief City. [Though Heliopolis be said by Pliny b 1.2, to have been built by the Arabians, and was therefore of no very ancient foundation, compared to Memphis. And Egypt was na∣turally divided into three parts, the upper, in which was Thebes; the middle, in which was Memphis; the lower in which was Heliopolis, and now Cairo, or Masre, nigh the place where Heliopolis once stood.]

Before the Invasion of the Pastors there was but one King over all Egypt, who would scarce have per∣mitted so open a faction, and so plain an emulation of the glory of his Imperial City. If now I had a mind to make the multiplication of this Idol almost equal with that of the division of the Kingdom (a thing no way proved) I would refer this to the times of Amosis, called Tethmosis corruptly by Josephus, and supposed to be the Contemporary of Shamgar. Amosis was that Prince who first recovered Heliopolis from the Pastors, imagined to be a sort of Arab-Egyptians. He is reputed a Theban, and from him Manetho begins his order of the Theban Kings. He set himself industriously to im∣prove Heliopolis, and he might grace it in the quality of a Rival of the ancient Memphis, which he had not such personal reason to be fond of. He might on this occasion set up Symbol after Symbol; for one part of

his care, and a very great one, is said to be Religion. He it was who purged Heliopolis of the barbarous cu∣stom of sacrificing men; in the room of which he sub∣stituted three Images of Wax, [the Symbols it may be of Apis, in the three places of Memphis, Hermuntis, and Heliopolis; which rendred him properly a three∣headed Pluto.] What I said of his purging Heliopolis, is by Porphyry a 1.3 related from Manetho, who, where he speaks of it, does mention Calves in the plural; for he says that men were offered to Juno, and proved after the manner of the selected, pure, and marked Calves of Egypt.

The truth is, there is little certainty in the story of Amosis, and least of all in the time of it. And I might say the like of that of the Pastors. And for the Bulls at Memphis and Heliopolis, I cannot but think them much later than the times of Jeroboam. If they had been ex∣tant long after; Herodotus who knew Egypt so well, and spake so often of Apis and of Heliopolis, whose Traditions he went to compare with those of Mem∣phis b 1.4, could as easily have mentioned Mnevis too, as Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch and Strabo, in after∣times.

Notes

• a 1.1

  D. Marsh. p. 59, 60, &c.
• b 1.2

  Plin. Nat. Hist. l. 6. c. 29. p. 144.
• a 1.3

  Porphyr. dt Abstin. l. 2. sect. 55. p. 94.
• b 1.4

  Herod. Enter. p. 101. c. & p. 103.