the Mysteries is foreign to the Hellenic mind. This worship is secret; its spirit is of awe, terror, remorse; its object is expiation of sin. Finally, it is a hieratic worship, in the hands of priests.

All this suggests Egypt as the origin of the Mysteries. The oldest were those celebrated in the island of Samothrace, near the coast of Asia Minor. Here Orpheus is reputed to have come and founded the Bacchic Mysteries; while another legend reports him to have been killed by the Bacchantes for wishing to substitute the worship of Apollo for that of Dionysos. This latter story, taken in connection with the civilizing influence ascribed to Orpheus, indicates his introducing a purer form of worship. He reformed the licentious drunken rites, and established in place of them a more serious religion. He died a martyr to this purer faith, killed by the women, who were incited to this, no doubt, by the priests of the old Bacchic worship.

The worship of Dionysos Zagreus, which was the Orphic form of Bacchism, contained the doctrines of retribution in another life, - a doctrine common to all the Greek Mysteries.

It would seem probable, from an investigation of this subject, that two elements of worship are to be found in the Greek religion, which were never quite harmonized. One is the worship of the Olympian deities, gods of light and day, gods of this world, and interested in our present human life. This worship tended to promote a free development of character; it was self-possessed, cheerful, and public; it left the worshipper unalarmed by any dread of the future, or any anxiety about his soul. For the Olympic gods cared little about the moral character of their worshippers; and the dark Fate which lay behind gods and men could not be propitiated by any rites, and must be encountered manfully, as one meets the inevitable.

The other worship, running parallel with this, was of the Cthonic gods, deities of earth and the under-world, rulers of the night-side of nature, and monarchs of the world to come. Their worship was solemn, mysterious,

secret, and concerned expiation of sin, and the salvation of the soul hereafter.

Now, when we consider that the Egyptian popular worship delighted in just such mysteries as these; that it related to the judgment of the soul hereafter; that its solemnities were secret and wrapped in dark symbols; and that the same awful Cthonic deities were the objects of its reverence; when we also remember that Herodotus and the other Greek writers state that the early religion of the Pelasgi was derived from Egypt, and that Orpheus, the Thracian, brought thence his doctrine, — there seems no good reason for denying such a source. On the other hand, nothing can be more probable than an immense influence on Pelasgic worship, derived through Thrace, from Egypt. This view is full of explanations, and makes much in the Greek mythology clear which would otherwise be obscure.

The Greek myth of Dêmêtêr and Persephonê, for example, seems to be an adaptation to the Hellenic mind and land of the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Isis. Both are symbols, first, of natural phenomena; and, secondly, of the progress of the human soul. The sad Isis seeking Osiris, and the sad Dêmêtêr seeking Persephonê, constitute evidently the same legend; only Osiris is the Nile, evaporated into scattered pools by the burning heat, while Persephonê is the seed, the treasure of the plant, which sinks into the earth, but is allowed to come up again as the stalk, and pass a part of its life in the upper air. But both these nature-myths were spiritualized in the Mysteries, and made to denote the wanderings of the soul in its search for truth. Similar to these legends was that of Dionysos Zagreus, belonging to Crete, according to Euripides and other writers. Zagreus was the son of the Cretan Zeus and Persephonê, and was hewn in pieces by the Titans, his heart alone being preserved by Athênê, who gave it to Zeus. Zeus killed the Titans, and enclosed the heart in a plaster image of his child. According to another form of the story, Zeus swallowed the heart, and from it reproduced another Dionysos. Apollo collected the rest of the members, and they were reunited, and restored to life.

The principal mysteries were those of Bacchus and Ceres. The Bacchic mysteries were very generally celebrated throughout Greece, and were a wild nature-worship; partaking of that frenzy which has in all nations been considered a method of gaining a supernatural and inspired state, or else as the result of it. The Siva worship in India, the Pythoness at Delphi, the Schamaism of the North, the whirling dervishes of the Mohammedans; and some of the scenes at the camp-meetings in the Western States, belong to the same class as the Bacchic orgies.

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The Eleusinian mysteries were very different. These were in honor of Ceres; they were imported from Egypt. The wanderings of Isis in search of Osiris were changed to those of Ceres or Dêmêtêr (the mother-earth Isis) in search of Persephonê. Both represented in a secondary symbolism the wanderings of the soul, seeking God and truth. This was the same idea as that of Apuleius in the beautiful story of Psyche.

These mysteries were celebrated at Eleusis by the Athenians every fourth year. They were said to have been introduced B. c. 1356, and were very sacred. All persons were required to be initiated. If they refused it they were supposed to be irreligious. "Have you been initiated?" was asked in dangerous situations. The initiated were said to be calm in view of death. It was the personal religion of the Greeks.

In the greater mysteries at Eleusis the candidates were crowned with myrtle, and admitted by night into a vast temple, where they were purified and instructed, and assisted at certain grand solemnities. The doctrines taught are unknown, but are supposed to have been the unity of God and the immortality of the soul. But this is only conjecture.

Bacchus is believed to have been originally an Indian god, naturalized in Greece, and his mysteries to be Indian in their character. The genial life of nature is the essential character of Bacchus. One of the names of the Indian Siva is Dionichi, which very nearly resembles the Greek name of Bacchus, Dionysos. He was taken from

T

the Meros, or thigh of Jupiter. Now Mount Meru, in India, is the home of the gods; by a common etymological error the Greeks may have thought it the Greek word for thigh, and so translated it.

The Bacchic worship, in its Thracian form, was always distasteful to the best of the Greeks; it was suspected and disliked by the enlightened, proscribed by kings, and rejected by communities. It was an interpolated system, foreign to the cheerful nature of Greek thought.

As to the value of the mysteries themselves, there was a great difference of opinion among the Greeks. The people, the orators, and many of the poets praised them; but the philosophers either disapproved them openly, or passed them by in silence. Socrates says no word in their favor in all his reported conversations. Plato complains of the immoral influence derived from believing that sin could be expiated by such ceremonies.* They seem to have contained, in reality, little direct instruction, but to have taught merely by a dramatic representation and symbolic pictures.

Who Orpheus was, and when he lived, can never be known. But the probabilities are that he brought from Egypt into Greece, what Moses took from Egypt into Palestine, the Egyptian ideas of culture, law, and civiliHe reformed the Bacchic mysteries, giving them a more elevated and noble character, and for this he lost his life. No better account of his work can be given than in the words of Lord Bacon.

"The merits of learning," says he, "in repressing the inconveniences which grow from man to man, was lively set forth by the ancients in that feigned relation of Orpheus' theatre, where all beasts and birds assembled; and, forgetting their several appetites, some of prey, some of game, some of quarrel, stood all sociably together, listening to the airs and accords of the harp; the sound thereof no sooner ceased or was drowned by some louder noise, but every beast returned to his own nature; wherein is aptly described the nature and condition of men, who are full of savage and unreclaimed desires of

* Republic, II. 17. See Döllinger's discussion of this subject, in "The Gentile and the Jew," English translation, Vol. I. p. 125.

profit, of lust, of revenge, which, as long as they give ear to precepts, to laws, to religion, sweetly touched by eloquence and persuasion of books, of sermons, of harangues, so long is society and peace maintained; but if these instruments be silent, or that sedition and tumult make them not audible, all things dissolve into anarchy and confusion." *

Of the Orphic doctrines we are able to give a somewhat better account. As far back as the sixth century before Christ, there were scattered through Greece hymns, lyrical poems, and prose treatises, treating of theological questions, and called Orphic writings. These works continued to be produced through many centuries, and evidently met an appetite in the Greek mind. They were not philosophy, they were not myths nor legends, but contained a mystic and pantheistic theology. The views of the Pythagoreans entered largely into this system. The Orphic writings develop, by degrees, a system of cosmogony, in which Time was the first principle of things, from which came chaos and ether. Then came the primitive egg, from which was born Phanes, or Manifestation. This being is the expression of intelligence, and creates the heavens and the earth. The soul is but the breath which comes from the whole universe, thus organized, and is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb, for sins committed in a former existence. Life is therefore not joy, but punishment and sorrow. At death the soul escapes from this prison, to pass through many changes, by which it will be gradually purified. All these notions are alien to the Greek mind, and are plainly a foreign importation. The true Greek was neither pantheist nor introspective. He did not torment himself about the origin of evil or the beginning of the universe, but took life as it came, cheerfully.

The pantheism of the Orphic theology is constantly apparent. Thus, in a poem preserved by Proclus and Eusebius it is said:

* Advancement of Learning.

+ Ottfried Müller has shown that some of these writings existed in the time of Euripides.

Cudworth's Intellectual System, I. 403 (Am. ed.). Rixner, Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, Anhang, Vol. I.