Like these also are the Egyptian beliefs ; for
they oftentimes call Isis by the name of Athena,
expressive of some such idea as this, ‘I came of
myself,’ which is indicative of self-impelled motion.
Typhon, as has been said,1 is named Seth and Bebon
and Smu, and these names would indicate some forcible
and preventive check or opposition or reversal.2
Moreover, they call the loadstone the bone of Horus,
and iron the bone of Typhon, as Manetho3 records.
For, as the iron oftentimes acts as if it were being
attracted and drawn toward the stone, and oftentimes is rejected and repelled in the opposite direction,
in the same way the salutary and good and rational
movement of the world at one time, by persuasion,
attracts and draws toward itself and renders more
[p. 149]
gentle that harsh and Typhonian movement, and then
again it gathers itself together and reverses it and
plunges it into difficulties.
Moreover, Eudoxus says that the Egyptians have
a mythical tradition in regard to Zeus that, because
his legs were grown together, he was not able to
walk, and so, for shame, tarried in the wilderness ;
but Isis, by severing and separating those parts of his
body, provided him with means of rapid progress.
This fable teaches by its legend that the mind and
reason of the god, fixed amid the unseen and invisible, advanced to generation by reason of motion.