"
To quote again from the writer in the Edinburgh Review, already cited;
"Its undoubted antiquity, no less than its extraordinary diffusion,
evidences that it must have been, as it may be said to be still in
unchristianized lands, emblematical of some fundamental doctrine or
mystery. The reader will not have failed to observe that it is most
usually associated with water; it was 'the key of the Nile,' that
mystical instrument by means of which, in the popular judgment of his
Egyptian devotees, Osiris produced the annual revivifying inundations of
the sacred stream; it is discernible in that mysterious pitcher or vase
portrayed on the brazen table of Bembus, before-mentioned, with its four
lips discharging as many streams of water in opposite directions; it was
the emblem of the water-deities of the Babylonians in the East and of
the Gothic nations in the West, as well as that of the rain-deities
respectively of the mixed population in America. We have seen with what
peculiar rites the symbol was honored by those widely separated races in
the western hemisphere; and the monumental slabs of Nineveh, now in the
museums of London and Paris, show us how it was similarly honored by the
successors of the Chaldees in the eastern.
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