2. For the ancient wise men, whose minds were, so to speak, more remote from their bodies, and thus nearer to heaven [than ours], in applying themselves most intently to investigate the interior secrets of nature, discovered clearly in the revolutions of their own times, that ages nobler than their own had preceded, and that in the beginning, justice and purity, with their attendant virtues, directed the helm of the kingdoms of the world; wherefore they taught posterity to believe that their deities, descending at that time from their astral abodes to the earth, consociated with mankind in all the friendship of life, so that heaven itself as it were descended from on high to these lower spheres, and poured forth its superior delights upon the inhabitants of air, or of its ultimate region of operation.
(Which thing the ancients also discerned, whence their Saturnian, golden, silver, and the following ages; and at first, or in the infancy (of the earth], paradises and perpetual springs were said to have existed.)
In compliment to these deities these times were called Saturnian and golden. The earth itself also they conceived to be adorned with the most delightful self-cultivated shrubberies and orchards, and they represented it as entirely converted into a sort of continual garden or paradise; yea, they contracted the four seasons of the year into one, and this they concluded to be a perpetual spring, which breathed its zephyrs continually, so that while it produced this temperature of the atmosphere, it also filled and refreshed the minds of the inhabitants with its blandishments.
[2] With such introductory scenery the ancient wise ones (Sophi) opened the theatre of the world which we behold, doubtless because in all its sports, or offspring and products, both living and dead, they contemplated an express image of such an order. For there is nothing but what commences its existence from its spring and blossom, and from its infancy and innocence; for particular representations are so many mirrors of things in and general representations general, are so many mirrors of things in particular, which have their allotted places under these general things.
(For there is nothing in the visible world which does not represent these general revolutions in itself.)
From the persuasion wrought by this perpetual authority of nature they conceived, in looking back to former times, that a similar state of spring and of infancy existed in their beginning. Let us also contemplate the face of the universe in the mirrors presented by the singulars of which it is composed, and from them let us evolve the fates of times and of ages. Nevertheless, without the favor and influence of the Supreme Deity, from whom, as from the only Fountain and Highest Sun of Wisdom, all truths flow down as rays into our understandings, vain would be our inquiry; wherefore, let us with adoration supplicate His presence and His favor.
