[62] 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 Manetho
3
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 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.
De Iside et Osiride. Plutarch. Frank Cole Babbitt (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1936.
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