Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Hence the Egyptians too did not entrust their mysteries to just anyone, nor did they broadcast what they knew of divine matters among the uninitiated masses; rather they reserved it for those destined to rise to kingship, and for such priests as had proven themselves most worthy by reason of upbringing, schooling, and lineage.
The riddling emblems of the Egyptians, then, are similar to the Hebrew ones at least in their manner of concealment. Some Egyptians represent the sun upon a ship, others upon a crocodile. They mean by this that the sun, making its course through sweet and moist air, begets time, which the crocodile signifies for some other sacerdotal reason. Indeed, in Diospolis in Egypt, on what is called the sacred gateway, there is carved a child as a symbol of coming-to-be, an old man as a symbol of decay, and again a hawk as a symbol of god, a fish as a symbol of hatred, and, according to yet another meaning, a crocodile as a symbol of shamelessness.
Assembled together, the whole emblem seems meant to convey this: O you who come into being and pass out of it again, god abhors shamelessness. Those who craft ears and eyes from costly material set them apart for the gods, offering them up within the temples, plainly implying thereby that the divine both sees and hears everything. Along with these figures, the lion is for them a symbol of strength and might, just as, of course, the ox is a symbol of the earth itself, of agriculture, and of nourishment, the horse of manliness and free speech, and the sphinx, having the whole body of a lion but the face of a man, a symbol of strength joined with understanding. In like manner, meaning to signify understanding, memory, power, and skill, they engrave the figure of man upon their sacred things.
Moreover, in what they term the komasiai, the festal processions of the gods, they parade golden figures — a pair of dogs, one hawk, and one ibis — and these four figures they name the four letters. The dogs, accordingly, stand for the two hemispheres, circling as though on watch; the hawk stands for the sun, being a scorching, ruinous creature — indeed pestilence itself they lay at the sun's door; while the ibis stands for the moon, they likening the shadowed parts of its plumage to the black and the luminous parts to the white. There are some who hold that the tropics are indicated by the dogs, which keep watch and guard the sun's passage toward the south and the north; while the equinoctial circle, being high and scorched, is shown by the hawk, just as the oblique circle is shown by the ibis; for the ibis seems to have furnished the Egyptians their first notion of number and measure among animals, just as the oblique circle did among the circles.
← All of Clement of Alexandria: Exhortation, Instructor & Miscellanies