Pendant to my post yesterday about Drummond's Oedipus Judaicus. The book, though its circulation was limited, nonetheless caused a small scandal. Ceric and scholar George D'Oyly published a rebuttal: Remarks on Sir W. Drummond's Oedipus Judaicus (1813) making all the points you might expect an orthodox Anglican of his generation to make. One of his ways of ridiculing Drummond's 'astrologicising' of the Bible was to assert that you could do the same thing with any text. Here he is, for instance, on the Aeneid:
I appreciate that D'Oyly is mocking here, but I'll confess I'm rather struck by that idea. I wonder if anyone has done it for real? I mean, produced a reading of The Aeneid in which the argument is that Vergil, a secret priest of Mithras (or somesuch), encoded a hidden astronomical allegory into his epic?
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