Therefore they maintain the wiser opinion, who hold
that the things here storied of Typhon, Osiris, and Isis
were not the events of Gods, nor yet of men, but of certain grand Daemons, whom Plato, Pythagoras, Xenocrates,
and Chrysippus (following herein the opinion of the most
ancient theologists) affirm to be of greater strength than
men, and to transcend our nature by much in power, but
not to have a divine part pure and unmixed, but such as
participates of both the soul's nature and the body's sensation, capable of receiving both pleasure and pain, and all
the passions that attend these mutations, which disorder
some of them more and others of them less. For there
are divers degrees both of virtue and vice, as among men,
so also among Daemons. For what they sing about among
the Greeks, concerning the Giants and the Titans, and of
certain horrible actions of Saturn, as also of Python's combats with Apollo, of the flights of Bacchus, and the ramblings of Ceres, come nothing short of the relations about
Osiris and Typhon and others such, which everybody may
lawfully and freely hear as they are told in the mythology.
The like may be also said of those things that, being veiled
over in the mystic rites and sacred ceremonies of initiation,
are therefore kept private from the sight and hearing of
the common sort.
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