That vegetation was made before the Sun was not an inconsistent idea to
the originators of the ancient Cosmogony. They imagined that the heat
and light, emanating from the elementary fire, were sufficient to
stimulate its growth, after which God the Son gathered it together and
made the Celestial luminaries. In the solar fables this imaginary
element is called the fire-ether, or sacred fire of the stars.
FALL AND REDEMPTION OF MAN.
Religion having been based upon the worship of personified nature, it
is evident that its founders fabricated its dogmatic element from their
conceptions of her destructive and reproductive processes as manifested
in the rotation and diversity of the seasons. The apparent retreat of
the sun from the earth, in winter, and his return in the spring,
suggesting the idea of a figurative death and resurrection of the
genius of that luminary, they applied these phenomena of the year to
man, and composed the allegories relative to his fall and redemption,
as inculcated in the Exoteric Creed. In the allegory relating to the
fall, it was taught that, after making the first human pair, the Lord
of Good or the Lord God placed them in a beautiful garden--corresponding
to the seasons of fruits and flowers or months of Spring and Summer,
with the injunction, under a, penalty, not to eat of the fruit of a
certain tree.
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