imagination of the people composed the Elysian Fields, delightful spots
in a world below, having their heaven, their sun, and their stars; and
Tartarus, a place of darkness, humidity, mire, and chilling frost.
Now, inasmuch as mankind, inquisitive about all that of which they are
ignorant, and desirous of a protracted existence, had already exerted
their faculties respecting what was to become of them after death;
inasmuch, as they had early reasoned upon that principle of life which
animates the body, and which quits it without changing the form of the
body, and had conceived to themselves airy substances, phantoms
and shades, they loved to believe that they should resume in the
subterranean world that life which it was so painful to lose; and this
abode appeared commodious for the reception of those beloved objects
which they could not prevail on themselves to renounce.

"On the other hand, the astrological and philosophical priests told such
stories of their heavens as perfectly quadrated with these fictions.
Having, in their metaphorical language, denominated the equinoxes and
solstices the gates of heaven, or the entrance of the seasons, they
explained the terrestrial phenomena by saying, that through the gate of
horn (first the bull, afterwards the ram,) vivifying fires descended,
which, in spring, gave life to vegetation, and aquatic spirits, which
caused, at the solstice, the overflowing of the Nile: that through the
gate of ivory (originally the bowman, or Sagittarius, then the balance,)
and through that of Capricorn, or the urn, the emanations or influences
of the heavens returned to their source and re-ascended to their origin;
and the Milky Way which passed through the doors of the solstices,
seemed to them to have been placed there on purpose to be their road
and vehicle. The celestial scene farther presented, according to their
Atlas, a river (the Nile, designated by the windings of the Hydra;)
together with a barge (the vessel Argo,) and the dog Sirius, both
bearing relation to that river, of which they foreboded the overflowing.
These circumstances, added to the preceding ones, increased the
probability of the fiction; and thus to arrive at Tartarus or Elysium,
souls were obliged to cross the rivers Styx and Acheron, in the boat of
Charon the ferryman, and to pass through the doors of horn and ivory,
which were guarded by the mastiff Cerberus. At length a civil usage was
joined to all these inventions, a