It becomes wise men, dame Clea, This Clea was priestess to Isis and to Apollo Delphicus. to go to the Gods for all the good things they would enjoy. Much more ought we, when we would aim at that knowledge of them which our nature can arrive at, to pray that they themselves would bestow it upon us; truth being the greatest good that man can receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give. Other good things he bestows on men as they want them, they being not his own peculiars nor of any use to himself. For the blessedness of the Deity consists not in silver and gold, nor yet his power in lightnings and thunders, but in knowledge and wisdom. And it was the best thing Homer ever said of Gods, when he pronounced thus: Both of one line, both of one country boast, But royal Jove’s the eldest and knows most; Il. XIII. 354. where he declares Jupiter’s prerogative in wisdom and science to be the more honorable, by terming it the elder. I, for my own part, do believe that the felicity of eternal living which the Gods enjoy lies mainly in this, that nothing escapes their cognizance that passes in the sphere of generation, and that, should we set aside wisdom and the knowledge of true beings, That is, τὰ ὄντα in the Platonic sense, as opposed to τὰ γιγνόμενα . (G.) immortality itself would not be life, but merely a long time. And therefore the desire of truth, especially in what relates to the Gods, is a sort of grasping after divinity, it using learning and enquiry for a kind of resumption of things sacred, a work doubtless of more religion than any ritual purgation or charge of temples whatever, and especially most acceptable to the Goddess you serve, since she is more eminently wise and speculative, and since knowledge and science (as her very name Plutarch derives Isis, in the usual uncritical way of ancient etymology, from the Greek root ἰς — , found in ἴστε from οἶδα . (G.) seems to import) appertain more peculiarly to her than any other thing. For the name of Isis is Greek, and so is that of her adversary Typhon, who, being puffed up That is, τετυφωμένος . (G.) through ignorance and mistake, pulls in pieces and destroys that holy doctrine, which she on the contrary collects, compiles, and delivers down to such as are regularly advanced unto the deified state; which, by constancy of sober diet, and abstaining from sundry meats and the use of women, both restrains the intemperate and voluptuous part, and habituates them to austere and hard services in the temples, the end of which is the knowledge of the original, supreme, and mental being, which the Goddess would have them enquire for, as near to herself and as dwelling with her. Besides, the very name of her temple most apparently promises the knowledge and acquaintance of true being ( τὸ ὄν ), for they call it Iseion ( )Ἴσειον ), as who should say, We shall know true being, if with reason and sanctimony we approach the sacred temples of this Goddess. Moreover, many have reported her the daughter of Hermes, and many of Prometheus; the latter of which they esteem as the author of wit and forecast, and the former of letters and music. For the same reason also they call the former of the Muses at Hermopolis at the same time Isis and Justice, Isis being (as we before said) no other than wisdom, and revealing things divine to such as are truly and justly styled the sacred bearers, and keepers of the sacred robes; and these are such as have in their minds, as in an ark, the sacred doctrine about the Gods, cleansed from superstitious frights and vain curiosities, keeping out of sight all dark and shady colors, and exposing to sight the light and gay ones, to insinuate something of the like kind in our persuasion about the Gods as we have represented to us in the sacred vestments. Wherefore, in that the priests of Isis are dressed up in these when they are dead, it is a token to us that this doctrine goes with them to the other life, and that nothing else can accompany them thither. For as neither the nourishing of beards nor the wearing of mantles can ren der men philosophers, so neither will linen garments or shaved heads make priests to Isis; but he is a true priest of Isis, who, after he hath received from the laws the representations and actions that refer to the Gods, doth next apply his reason to the enquiry and speculation of the truth contained in them. For the greater part of men are ignorant even of this most common and ordinary thing, for what reason priests lay aside their hair and go in linen garments. Some are not at all solicitous to be informed about such questions; and others say their veneration for sheep is the cause why they abstain from their wool as well as their flesh, and that they shave their heads in token of mourning, and that they wear linen because of the bloomy color which the flax sendeth forth, in imitation of that ethereal clarity that environs the world. But indeed the true reason of them all is one and the same. For it is not lawful (as Plato saith) for a clean thing to be touched by an unclean; but now no superfluity of food or excrementitious substance can be pure or clean; but wool, down, hair, and nails come up and grow from superfluous excrements. It would be therefore an absurdity for them to lay aside their own hair in purgations, by shaving themselves and by making their bodies all over smooth, and yet in the mean time to wear and carry about them the hairs of brutes. For we ought to think that the poet Hesiod, when he saith, Not at a feast of Gods from five-branched tree With sharp-edged steel to part the green from dry, Hes. Works and Days , 740. That is, Do not cut your nails at a banquet of the Gods. The briefer precept of Pythagoras was, Παρὰ θυσίαν μὴ ὀνυχίζου . (G.) would teach us to keep the feast when we are already cleansed from such things as these, and not in the solemnities themselves to use purgation or removal of excrementitious superfluities. But now flax springs up from an immortal being, the earth, and bears an eatable fruit, and affords a simple and cleanly clothing, not burdensome to him that is covered with it, and convenient for every season of the year, and which besides (as they tell us) is the least subject to engender vermin; but of this to discourse in this place would not be pertinent. But now the priests do so abhor all kinds of superfluous excrements, that they not only decline most sorts of pulse, and of flesh that of sheep and swine, which produce much superfluity, but also in the time of their purgations they exclude salt from their meals. For which, as they have several other good reasons, so more especially this, that it whets the appetite and renders men over-eager after meat and drink. For that the reason why salt is not accounted clean should be (as Aristagoras tells us) because that, when it is hardened together, many little animals are catched in it and there die, is fond and ridiculous. They are also said to water the Apis from a well of his own, and to restrain him altogether from the river Nile, — not because they hold the water for polluted by reason of the crocodile, as some suppose, for there is nothing in the world in more esteem with the Egyptians than the Nile, but because the water of the Nile being drunk is observed to be very feeding, and above all others to conduce to the increase of flesh. But they would not have the Apis nor themselves neither to be over fat; but that their bodies should sit light and easy about their souls, and not press and squeeze them down by a mortal part overpowering and weighing down the divine.