DESTINY READ IN THE STARS. (Vol. XIII, p. 256.) "Ye have read in the tables of heaven all that will happen to you and your childen," is said to be quoted from a prayer of Jacob. There are some who claim they can actually find the Hebrew alphabet in the heavens formed from the asterisms in the constellations, mostly in tke zodiacal clusters. Sir Willian Drummond has expounded the 49th chapter of Genesis in his "Edipus Judaicus," giving his views of Jacob's last words to his twelve children.

J. H. Broome, in his work on "The Astral Origin of the Emblems, the Zodiacal Signs, and the Astral Hebrew Alphabet,” says :

"The first twelve letters in the Hebrew alphabet correspond with the shapes of the constellations of those signs, beginning in Taurus, taking the drawings of the letters from the chief stars in each constellation. The announcement of the coming 'Seed' appears in these short sentences, and again, but in stellar characters, in the sky itself, answing to the twelve signs, from Taurus in succession. And they read thus:

A. B., The Redeemer; Gad, comes; Hu, the same is; Zâ-yin, the weapon; Kht., of sin; Yokhal, able to do it. This very question our Lord, when He did come, put to the blind men who came to him, Believe ye that I am able to do this?" (Matthew ix, 23, and often so used in the Old Testament Scriptures.

66

"In starry promises of old they trace,

Him who should bruise the serpent's head.
Victor o'er sin; for this He bled

To save a guilty fallen race."

Rev. Mr. Broome says he showed these sentences to a Jewish Rabbi in the west of Lebanon, England, and the Rabbi candidly confessed that the Hebrew letters were formed from the asterisms in the constellations, showing them to be the origin of the Hebrew alphabet. Jewish and Arabian writers have a tradition that astronomy began to be cultivated by Seth, and that he and his family invented the twelve signs, gave emblems for the constellations, and names to the stars. The Jews say that man was created when the sun was in the sign Virgo, the Virgin; they therefore began their civil year with September 14th.

"BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN NEVER TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL." (Vol. XIV, p. 120.) This quotation, inquired for by "T. T.," is from Tennyson's In Memoriam. J. G. GHOLSON.

DEATH OF ENOCH. When Adam learned of the death of his son, says the tradition, he set out in search of Cain, but could not find him. Then he recited the following lines:

66

Every city is alike, each mortal man is vile,

The face of earth has desert grown, the sky has ceased to smile;

Every flower has lost its hue, and every gem is dim;

Ah! my son, my son is dead, the brown earth swallows him!
We one have had in midst of us whom death has not yet found,

No peace for him, no rest for him, treading the blood-drenched ground."

THE TWELFTH AND LAST IMAM. The Mahommedans have the tradition which they borrowd from the Jews. They applied it in their fantastic way to one of their Imams. The tradition is as to the future return of Enoch and Elias to the earth. The twelfth and last of the Persian Imams, or Pontiffs, bears the title "Mahadi," or the Guide, and is believed to have suppassed his predecessors in righteousness. Gibbon says: "He is concealed in a cavern near Bagdad; the time and place of his death are unknown, and his votaries pretend that he still lives, and will appear before the day of judgment to overthrow the tyranny of Dejal, or the Antichrist.-Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. IX, p. 348.

A volume has recently been published, in London, entitled "The Antichrist Legend; a Chapter in Christian and Jewish Folklore," by A. H. Keane, late Vice President of the Anthropological Institute.

ENLIGHTENED. This word, equivalent to the illuminatus, is frequently used to designate a Freemason as one who has been rescued from darkness, and received intellectual light. Webster's definition shows its appositeness: "Illuminated; instructed; Illuminated; instructed; informed; furnished with clear views." Many old Latin diplomas commence with the heading, "Omnibus illuminatis," that is "to all the enlightened." Enoch, whose name means "initiated," as history and tradition say, passed his lifetime in instructing and enlightening the people of his day and generation in the knowledge of the arts and sciences.

THE ILIAD MENTIONED IN HERODOTUS. Is the Iliad mentioned by name prior to the Christian era? ALEX.

We answer yes, twice in Herodotus, Euterte ii, 116-117, where he quotes from both the Iliad ahd Odyssey. It is also once mentioned Xenophon. The earliest quotation from Homer is made by Simonides of Ceos, born B. C. 556, who quotes the Iliad iv, 148, as an utterance of "the man of Chios." (Vol. XIV, p. 144.)

The Aboriginal Calendar.

BY PROFFSSOR ABEL, OF BERLIN, IN THE NATION," JULY 6, 1889.

TRANSLATEB BY ERNEST DE BUNSEN, LONDON, ENG.

The accounts of the most ancient history of humanity, the farther we step back into them, become usually the more unsafe. Therefore, with a view of fixing the dates, the natural means has been seized to reckon backwards from the later and better determined, to the earlier and less determined times, and chronologically to restore more ancient periods, for which no continuous chronology has been transmitted, with the help of national stories, as also of contemporaneous events with other nations. In this way it has been possible, as regards the most important part of earliest history, the biblical part, to go back to Solomon from Herod the Great, the originator of the Arabian dynasty imposed on the Romans by the Jews, which had so ill-fated an influence on the destinies of the country and of then rising Christianity. By the agreement of Jewish, Roman, and astronomical dates, the year B. C. 4 resulted for the death of Herod. Thus a firm point was gained, to which could be joined, by farther retrocession, the Babylonian destruction of the Temple and other incidents, by similar contemporaneous events in national histories. According to the Books of Kings and the synchronisms contained in the same, it was especially the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonian tribal associates of the Jews, which is joined to other Babylonian, Egyptian, and Jewish dates, by which it became possible to reckon backwards the Jewish lists of rulers up to Solomon, who was placed about B. C. 1000. From this time the Jewish dates, as well as their connection with non-Jewish events, were too much torn asunder and indefinite, and the events themselves either too doubtful or too evidently symbolisings of tedious historical incidents, than to encourage a farther step into chronological darkness of earlier times. Though according to the more general calculations, which alone seemed to be probable, Abraham had to be placed at least 1000 years before Solomon, and though from Abraham until Adam the biblical aboriginal patriarchs required for themselves a life-period of other 2000 years, these 3000 half historical years, resulting therefrom, remained unfathomable in their dates and thus problematical in their historical character. To place in the middle of this dark time on Jewish soil a number of chronological border-stones, and thereby also to heighten the certainty of the events to which they refer, either as real occurrences or at least as pointed embodiments of entire historical processes, this has been the result of different writings which Herr Ernst von Bun

sen has lately dedicated entirely or in part to this problem. By this extraordinary success of a sagacious and learned investigator, Hebrew chronology, which hitherto reckoned only 1000 reliable years, is enlarged by a farther period of 1500 years, capable of being controlled in various ways, and thus associated with the Egyptian and Assyrian dates, which for already a long time have been more or less fixed as going far beyond the Hebrew dates. It is the method which balances, corrects, and confirms dates far removed in space and time, and the great result which is gained from the critical connection of many small and dissociated statements, which render the discovery equally remarkable.

A priest of Baal called Berosus, who under Alexander the Great served at the Temple of his still flourishing God in Babylon, considered it in the spirit of the hellenising direction of those times as a thankworthy literary work to transform the Assyrian annuals of the local archive from the Semitic cuneiform inscription into Greek. From the long lost work some fragments have been preserved, especially by Jewish and Jewish-Christian writers, Josephus, Eusebius and others, in one of which reference is made to a capture of Babylon by the Medes in the year B. C. 2458. In Genesis X, the Medes are designated as Japhetites (Indogermans), but in the same place, most of the later Semitic lands are said to have been Hamitic on the one side, whilst on the other they were conquered like Babylon by Indogermans, probably long after the original occupation. Thus the supposition was suggested, that in the Bible under Shemites were aboriginally understood Hamitic people subjugated by Japhetites. If this far-reaching hypothesis, which we shall not at present farther investigate, was justifiable, it easily suggested itself to regard the capture of Hamitic Babylon by Japhetic Medes as the commencement of Semitism, in the biblical language, which created an eponymic hero, as the birth of Shem. Thus according to Berosus Shem would have been born B. C. 2458, and since according to the Bible Shem is said to have been a hundred years old two years after the Flood, the year of the Flood was fixed for B. C. 2360. Thus far all is an unsubstantiated though ingenious hypothesis, built up from fluctuating ingredients gathered on historical and ethnographical soil. For neither the date of Berosus need be right, nor the attempted new explanation of the name Semitism, nor the interpretation drawn from both of the birth of Shem, nor the calculation of the year of the Flood based on the latter.

But now a first confirmation is added from another and remote side. The Latin grammarian Censorinus, writing 250 A. D., therefore 600 years after Berosus, and 700 years after Ezra and his fixing of the Hebrew canon, without knowing Herr von Bunsen's calculation which followed 1640 years later, yea, even without any calculation,

and only relying on the testimony of Varro who lived 300 years before him, mentions the year 2360 as the year of the Hebrew Flood. By this remarkable coincidence a Roman foundation is placed under the German hypothesis, the Hebrew-Babylonian bricks of which, from the loose conjecture in which they had experimentally been joined one to another, now begin to meet and to form a consolidated structure. Further confirmations of the discovered fundamental date quickly follow. Supposing it to be correct, then Abraham, who according to Genesis is said to have gone from Mesopotamia to Syria 367 years after the Flood, must have emigrated in B. C. 1993. According to Josephus he went away becanse the ancient Hamitic Nimrod-dynasty, under which his father Terah had lived in Haran, lost its throne, and indeed according to Berosus a new dynasty was set up in Babylon 1993. Again, according to Mosaic Scriptures 480 years after Abraham's journey, from Haran, therefore B. C. 1563 the return from Egypt began, of his descendants, who had travelled farther on. This date is confirmed by the statement of Orosius that the Pharaoh of the Exodus died 1558, and also by Manetho's report that the Pharaoh of the Exodus lived until 43 years before Tuthmoses III, whose ascension to the throne in 1515 is astronomically determined, so that Amenophis I, who died in 1558, was the Pharaoh of the Exodus.

Among the many confirming incidents which present themselves with mathematical certainty, is the fact that this calculation based on the year 2458 leads up to Solomon, whose date had been already retrospectively and approximately arrived at. If the fundamental date 2458 is correct, and Josephus has rightly computed the period between the Exodus from Egypt, 1563, and the Solomonian foundation of the Temple at 592 years, the latter must have taken place 971. This date is confirmed by a succession of astronomical, Roman, and Semitic facts, and even by the apparently contradictory statement of Paul about the 450 years period. Only to mention one Roman GreekSemitic substantiation of the fact, according to the Bible, Solomon, whose people were exclusively shepherds and agriculturists, applied to king Hiram of Tyre his Phoenician associate in tribe and language, in order to procure manual labourers and materials for the Temple. According to the Jewish-Roman writer, Josephus, who soon after Christ's death derived his statements from Menander, of uncertain date, who again borrowed them from Tyrian annals, Hiram lived 150 years and 8 months before the foundation of Carthage, which according to Cicero took place B. C. 815, so that Hiram did live in 971. Numerous other dates are verified in the same manner.

Thus it is seen how the synchronisms mutually confirm each other, when, collected from the wide field of ancient literature, fragmenttarily put together from so many languages, nations, and times, they are proved and united one to another by the right keys and