Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. III — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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6 And also at the end of his Hymn to Apollo, ii. 112; also
Epigram. Frag., 70.
6 Or., 49 ; ed. Jebb, p. 497. 7 Of. Julian, Ep. ad Dionys.
8 Dial. Dew., xx. 2.
9 Hermot., xx. ; cf. Nig., xxxii. ; Dial. Deor., ix. ; Ver. Hist., ii. 3 ; Bab. Fab., lix. ; and Jup. Trag., xxii.
10 Dear. Gonsil, iv.
Moinus one of the persons of the dialogue with Zeus and Hermes. Momus finds fault because Bacchus is reckoned among the gods, and is commanded by Zeus to refrain from making ridicule of Hercules and Asclepius.
The popular figure of Momus was that of a feeble old man,1 — a very different representation from the grandiose Intelligence of our treatise, a true Lucifer.
Some representations give his one sharp tooth, and others wings. The story runs that Zeus finally banished him from Olympus for his fault-finding.2
The Onomastwa, Vaticana3 connects Momus with Mammon ; but this side-issue need not detain us.4
THE MYSTIC GEOGRAPHY OF SACRED LANDS
With regard to the symbolic figure of the Earth of §§ 46-48 of the second K. K. Extract, and the persuasion that Egypt was the heart or centre thereof, we may append two quotations on the subject from widely different standpoints. The first is from Dr Andrew D. White's recent volumes 5 :
" Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth.
" The Chaldeans held that their ' holy house of the gods' was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon ; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized
1 Philostratus, Ep. 21.
2 For the above and other references, see Trumpel's art.
" Momus," in Reseller's Lexicon.
3 Lug., 194, 59.
4 See Nestle's art. "Mammon," in Cheyne's Encyclopaedia Biblica.
6 Op. supra cit., i. 98, 99.
world was concerned, Olympus or the temple of Delphi ; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone ; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the ' middle kingdom.' It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem.
" The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the 'ages of faith' this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth's centre ; in the ninth century Archbishop Kabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument ; in the eleventh century Hugh of St Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, ' Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth ' ; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the monk Csesarius of Heisterbach, declared, 'As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth,' — ' so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the earth.' Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty, wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox.
"Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco,