Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1828 edition. Excerpt: ... the fish Derceto or as the white dove Semiramis, and boasted of that Queen as their country-woman from Ascalon. These things are wonderful, but they are certain; and when mankind remember that they happened not in brutal ignorance, but in the enjoyment of a most refined wisdom, which had repudiated "the foolish things" of God, and had stored up and sealed under oaths and curses and an awful taciturnity the arcana of three worlds, they ought a little to mistrust themselves, the audax Iapeti genus. I will not endeavour to pursue so vile a topic any farther, or to analyse all the luxuries and princely recreations Principis angusta Caprearum in rupe sedentfa Cum grege Chaldiea; it has sufficiently appeared that one ancient city and one famous woman was indeed what Scripture calls her, " the mother of "the abominations of the earth." The mother of Zohawk (saith the Zendavesta) introduced the ten shames. XIII. Shocking as these aberrations of human nature may seem, they were inferiour in their magnitude to that grand stroke of Scmiramian policy the "forbidding w to marry.' Marriage has been generally regarded both by heathens and in the church as a religious rite of great solemnity, but in Babylon, in divers places which retained and cherished the philosophy of the queen of Babel, and in the mystic fraternities of conjurati, the opposite doctrine obtained and fornication was a sacrament. Every woman in Babylon was bound by the ecclesiastical law once in her life to prostitute her person for money. She sat in the grove of Venus Mylitta before the temple of that goddess, and whoever desired her acquaintance cast money into her lap, crying, " I invoke the blessing of "Mylitta upon you," and was immediately admitted to the sacrament of that deity....
