the Zodiac, to bring back his mother to the sky as Thyone; or what has
the same meaning, to consummate his eventful marriage with Persephone,
thereby securing, like the nuptials of his father with Semele or Danaë,
the perpetuity of Nature. His under-earth office is the depression of
the year, the wintry aspect in the alternations of bull and serpent,
whose united series makes up the continuity of Time, and in which,
physically speaking, the stern and dark are ever the parents of the
beautiful and bright.
It was this aspect, sombre for the moment, but bright by anticipation,
which was contemplated in the Mysteries: the human sufferer was consoled
by witnessing the severer trials of the Gods; and the vicissitudes of
life and death, expressed by apposite symbols, such as the sacrifice or
submersion of the Bull, the extinction and re-illumination of the torch,
excited corresponding emotions of alternate grief and joy, that play of
passion which was present at the origin of Nature, and which accompanies
all her changes.
The greater Eleusiniæ; were celebrated in the month Boëdromion, when the
seed was buried in the ground, and when the year, verging to its
decline, disposes the mind to serious reflection. The first days of the
ceremonial were passed in sorrow and anxious silence, in fasting and
expiatory or lustral offices. On a sudden, the scene was changed: sorrow
and lamentation were discarded, the glad name of Iacchus passed from
mouth to mouth, the image of the God, crowned with myrtle and bearing a
lighted torch, was borne in joyful procession from the Ceramicus to
Eleusis, where, during the ensuing night, the initiation was completed
by an imposing revelation. The first scene was in the [Greek: προναος],
or outer court of the sacred enclosure, where amidst utter darkness, or
while the meditating God, the star illuminating the Nocturnal Mystery,
alone carried an unextinguished torch, the candidates were overawed with
terrific sounds and noises, while they painfully groped their way, as in
the gloomy cavern of the soul's sublunar migration; a scene justly
compared to the passage of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. For by the
immutable law exemplified in the trials of Psyche, man must pass through
the terrors of the under-world, before he can reach the height of
Heaven. At length the gates of the _adytum_ were thrown open, a
supernatural light streamed from the illuminated statue of the Goddess,
and enchanting sights and sounds, mingled with songs and dances, exalted
the communicant to a rapture of supreme felicity, realizing, as far as
sensuous imagery could depict, the anticipated reunion with the Gods.
In the dearth of direct evidence as to the detail of the ceremonies
enacted, or of the meanings connected with them, their tendency must be
inferred from the characteristics of the contemplated deities with their
accessory symbols and mythi, or from direct testimony as to the value of
the Mysteries generally.
The ordinary phenomena of vegetation, the death of the seed in giving
birth to the plant, connecting the sublimest hopes with the plainest
occurrences, was the simple yet beautiful formula assumed by the great
mystery in almost all religions, from the Zend-Avesta to the Gospel. As
Proserpina, the divine power is as the seed decaying and destroyed; as
Artemis, she is the principle of its destruction; but Artemis Proserpina
is also Cotē Soteria, the Saviour, who leads the Spirits of Hercules and
Hyacinthus to Heaven.
Many other emblems were employed in the Mysteries,--as the dove, the
myrtle-wreath, and others, all significant of life rising out of death,
and of the equivocal condition of dying yet immortal man.
The horrors and punishments of Tartarus, as described in the Phædo and
the Æneid, with all the ceremonies of the judgments of Minos, Eacus, and
Rhadamanthus, were represented, sometimes more and sometimes less fully,
in the Mysteries; in order to impress upon the minds of the Initiates
this great lesson,--that we should be ever prepared to appear before the
Supreme Judge, with a heart pure and spotless; as Socrates teaches in
the Gorgias. For the soul stained with crimes, he says, to descend to
the Shades, is the bitterest ill. To adhere to Justice and Wisdom, Plato
holds, is our duty, that we may some day take that lofty road that leads
toward the heavens, and avoid most of the evils to which the soul is
exposed in its subterranean journey of a thousand years. And so in the
Phædo, Socrates teaches that we should seek here below to free our soul
of its passions, in order to be ready to enter our appearance, whenever
Destiny summons us to the Shades.
Thus the Mysteries inculcated a great moral truth, veiled with a fable
of huge proportions and the appliances of an impressive spectacle, to
which, exhibited in the sanctuaries, art and natural magic lent all
they had that was imposing. They sought to strengthen men against the
horrors of death and the fearful idea of utter annihilation. Death, says
the author of the dialogue, entitled _Axiochus_, included in the works
of Plato, is but a passage to a happier state; but one must have lived
well, to attain that most fortunate result. So that the doctrine of the
immortality of the soul was consoling to the virtuous and religious man
alone; while to all others it came with menaces and despair, surrounding
them with terrors and alarms that disturbed their repose during all
their life.
For the material horrors of Tartarus, allegorical to the Initiate, were
real to the mass of the Profane; nor in latter times, did, perhaps many
Initiates read rightly the allegory. The triple-walled prison, which the
condemned soul first met, round which swelled and surged the fiery waves
of Phlegethon, wherein rolled roaring, huge, blazing rocks; the great
gate with columns of adamant, which none save the Gods could crush;
Tisiphone, their warder, with her bloody robes; the lash resounding on
the mangled bodies of the miserable unfortunates, their plaintive
groans, mingled in horrid harmony with the clashings of their chains;
the Furies, lashing the guilty with their snakes; the awful abyss where
Hydra howls with its hundred heads, greedy to devour; Tityus, prostrate,
and his entrails fed upon by the cruel vulture: Sisyphus, ever rolling
his rock; Ixion on his wheel; Tantalus tortured by eternal thirst and
hunger, in the midst of water and with declicious fruits touching his
head; the daughters of Danaus at their eternal, fruitless task; beasts
biting and venomous reptiles stinging; and devouring flame eternally
consuming bodies ever renewed in endless agony; all these sternly
impressed upon the people the terrible consequences of sin and vice, and
urged them to pursue the paths of honesty and virtue.
And if, in the ceremonies of the Mysteries, these material horrors were
explained to the Initiates as mere symbols of the unimaginable torture,
remorse, and agony that would rend the immaterial soul and rack the
immortal spirit, they were feeble and insufficient in the same mode and
measure only, as all material images and symbols fall short of that
which is beyond the cognizance of our senses: and the grave Hierophant,
the imagery, the paintings, the dramatic horrors, the funeral
sacrifices, the august mysteries, the solemn silence of the sanctuaries,
were none the less impressive, because they were known to be but
symbols, that with material shows and images made the imagination to be
the teacher of the intellect.
So, too, it was represented, that except for the gravest sins there was
an opportunity for expiation; and the tests of _water_, _air_, and
_fire_ were represented; by means of which, during the march of many
years, the soul could be purified, and rise toward the ethereal regions;
that ascent being more or less tedious and laborious, according as each
soul was more or less clogged by the gross impediments of its sins and
vices. Herein was shadowed forth, (how distinctly taught the Initiates
we know not), the doctrine that pain and sorrow, misfortune and remorse,
are the inevitable _consequences_ that flow from sin and vice, as effect
flows from cause; that by each sin and every act of vice the soul drops
back and loses ground in its advance toward perfection: and that the
ground so lost is and will be in reality never so recovered as that the
sin shall be as if it never had been committed; but that throughout all
the eternity of its existence, each soul shall be conscious that every
act of vice or baseness it did on earth has made the distance greater
between itself and ultimate perfection.
We see this truth glimmering in the doctrine, taught in the Mysteries,
that though slight and ordinary offences could be expiated by penances,
repentance, acts of beneficence, and prayers, grave crimes were mortal
sins, beyond the reach of all such remedies. Eleusis closed her gates
against Nero: and the Pagan Priests told Constantine that among all
their modes of expiation there was none so potent as could wash from
_his_ soul the dark spots left by the murder of his wife, and his
multiplied perjuries and assassinations.
The object of the ancient initiations being to ameliorate mankind and to
perfect the intellectual part of man, the nature of the human soul, its
origin, its destination, its relations to the body and to universal
nature, all formed part of the mystic science; and to them in part the
lessons given to the Initiate were directed. For it was believed that
initiation tended to his perfection, and to preventing the divine part
within him, overloaded with matter gross and earthy, from being plunged
into gloom, and impeded in its return to the Deity. The soul, with them,
was not a mere conception or abstraction; but a reality including in
itself life and thought; or, rather, of whose essence it was to live and
think.
It was material; but not brute, inert, inactive, lifeless, motionless,
formless, lightless matter. It was held to be active, reasoning,
thinking; its natural home in the highest regions of the Universe,
whence it descended to illuminate, give form and movement to, vivify,
animate, and carry with itself the baser matter; and whither it
unceasingly tends to reascend, when and as soon as it can free itself
from its connection with that matter. From that substance, divine,
infinitely delicate and active, essentially luminous, the souls of men
were formed, and by it alone, uniting with and organizing their bodies,
men _lived_.
This was the doctrine of Pythagoras, who learned it when he received the
Egyptian Mysteries: and it was the doctrine of all who, by means of the
ceremonial of initiation, thought to purify the soul. Virgil makes the
spirit of Anchises teach it to Æneas: and all the expiations and
lustrations used in the Mysteries were but symbols of those intellectual
ones by which the soul was to be purged of its vice-spots and stains,
and freed of the incumbrance of its earthly prison, so that it might
rise unimpeded to the source from which it came.
Hence sprung the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; which
Pythagoras taught as an allegory, and those who came after him received
literally. Plato, like him, drew his doctrines from the East and the
Mysteries, and undertook to translate the language of the symbols used
there, into that of Philosophy; and to prove by argument and
philosophical deduction, what, _felt_ by the consciousness, the
Mysteries taught by symbols as an indisputable fact,--the immortality of
the soul. Cicero did the same; and followed the Mysteries in teaching
that the Gods were but mortal men, who for their great virtues and
signal services had deserved that their souls should, after death, be
raised to that lofty rank.
It being taught in the Mysteries, either by way of allegory, the meaning
of which was not made known except to a select few, or, perhaps only at
a later day, as an actual reality, that the souls of the vicious dead
passed into the bodies of those animals to whose nature their vices had
most affinity, it was also taught that the soul could avoid these
transmigrations, often successive and numerous, by the practice of
virtue, which would acquit it of them, free it from the circle of
successive generations, and restore it at once to its source. Hence
nothing was so ardently prayed for by the Initiates, says Proclus, as
this happy fortune, which, delivering them from the empire of Evil,
would restore them to their true life, and conduct them to the place of
final rest. To this doctrine probably referred those figures of animals
and monsters which were exhibited to the Initiate, before allowing him
to see the sacred light for which he sighed.
Plato says, that souls will not reach the term of their ills, until the
revolutions of the world have restored them to their primitive
condition, and purified them from the stains which they have contracted
by the contagion of fire, earth, and air. And he held that they could
not be allowed to enter Heaven, until they had distinguished themselves
by the practice of virtue in some one of three several bodies. The
Manicheans allowed five: Pindar, the same number as Plato; as did the
Jews.
And Cicero says, that the ancient soothsayers, and the interpreters of
the will of the Gods, in their religious ceremonies and initiations,
taught that we expiate here below the crimes committed in a prior life;
and for that are born. It was taught in these Mysteries, that the soul
passes through several states, and that the pains and sorrows of this
life are an expiation of prior faults.
This doctrine of transmigration of souls obtained, as Porphyry informs
us, among the Persians and Magi. It was held in the East and the West,
and that from the remotest antiquity. Herodotus found it among the
Egyptians, who made the term of the circle of migrations from one human
body, through animals, fishes, and birds, to another human body, three
thousand years. Empedocles even held that souls went into plants. Of
these, the laurel was the noblest, as of animals the lion; both being
consecrated to the Sun, to which, it was held in the Orient, virtuous
souls were to return. The Curds, the Chinese, the Kabbalists, all held
the same doctrine. So Origen held, and the Bishop Synesius, the latter
of whom had been initiated, and who thus prayed to God: "O Father, grant
that my soul, reunited to the light, may not be plunged again into the
defilements of earth!" So the Gnostics held; and even the Disciples of
Christ inquired if the man who was born blind, was not so punished for
some sin that he had committed before his birth.
Virgil, in the celebrated allegory in which he develops the doctrines
taught in the Mysteries, enunciated the doctrine, held by most of the
ancient philosophers, of the pre-existence of souls, in the eternal fire
from which they emanate; that fire which animates the Stars, and
circulates in every part of Nature: and the purifications of the soul,
by fire, water, and air, of which he speaks, and which three modes were
employed in the Mysteries of Bacchus, were symbols of the passage of the
soul into different bodies.
The relations of the human soul with the rest of nature were a chief
object of the science of the Mysteries. The man was there brought face
to face with entire nature. The world, and the spherical envelope that
surrounds it, were represented by a mystic egg, by the side of the image
of the Sun-God whose Mysteries were celebrated. The famous Orphic egg
was consecrated to Bacchus in his Mysteries. It was, says Plutarch, an
image of the Universe, which engenders everything, and contains
everything in its bosom. "Consult," says Macrobius, "the Initiates of
the Mysteries of Bacchus, who honor with special veneration the sacred
egg." The rounded and almost spherical form of its shell, he says, which
encloses it on every side, and confines within itself the principles of
life, is a symbolic image of the world; and the world is the universal
principle of all things.
This symbol was borrowed from the Egyptians, who also consecrated the
egg to Osiris, germ of Light, himself born, says Diodorus, from that
famous egg. In Thebes, in Upper Egypt, he was represented as emitting it
from his mouth, and causing to issue from it the first principle of heat
and light, or the Fire-God, Vulcan, or Phtha. We find this egg even in
Japan, between the horns of the famous Mithriac Bull, whose attributes
Osiris, Apis, and Bacchus all borrowed.
Orpheus, author of the Grecian Mysteries, which he carried from Egypt to
Greece, consecrated this symbol: and taught that matter, uncreated and
informous, existed from all eternity, unorganized, as chaos; containing
in itself the Principles of all Existences confused and intermingled,
light with darkness, the dry with the humid, heat with cold; from which,
it after long ages taking the shape of an immense egg, issued the purest
matter, or first substance, and the residue was divided into the four
elements, from which proceeded heaven and earth and all things else.
This grand Cosmogonic idea he taught in the Mysteries; and thus the
Hierophant explained the meaning of the mystic egg, seen by the
Initiates in the Sanctuary.
Thus entire Nature, in her primitive organization, was presented to him
whom it was wished to instruct in her secrets and initiate in her
mysteries; and Clemens of Alexandria might well say that initiation was
a real physiology.
So Phanes, the Light-God, in the Mysteries of the New Orphics, emerged
from the egg of chaos: and the Persians had the great egg of Ormuzd. And
Sanchoniathon tells us that in the Phœnician theology, the matter of
chaos took the form of an egg; and he adds: "Such are the lessons which
the Son of Thabion, first Hierophant of the Phœnicians, turned into
allegories, in which physics and astronomy intermingled, and which he
taught to the other Hierophants, whose duty it was to preside at orgies
and initiations; and who, seeking to excite the astonishment and
admiration of mortals, faithfully transmitted these things to their
successors and the Initiates."
In the Mysteries was also taught the division of the Universal Cause
into an Active and a Passive cause; of which two, Osiris and Isis,--the
heavens and the earth were symbols. These two First Causes, into which
it was held that the great Universal First Cause at the beginning of
things divided itself, were the two great Divinities, whose worship was,
according to Varro, inculcated upon the Initiates at Samothrace. "As is
taught," he says, "in the initiation into the Mysteries at Samothrace,
Heaven and Earth are regarded as the two first Divinities. They are the
potent Gods worshipped in that Island, and whose names are consecrated
in the books of our Augurs. One of them is male and the other female;
and they bear the same relation to each other as the soul does to the
body, humidity to dryness." The Curetes, in Crete, had builded an altar
to Heaven and to Earth; whose Mysteries they celebrated at Gnossus, in a
cypress grove.
These two Divinities, the Active and Passive Principles of the Universe,
were commonly symbolized by the generative parts of man and woman; to
which, in remote ages, no idea of indecency was attached; the _Phallus_
and _Cteis_, emblems of generation and production, and which, as such,
appeared in the Mysteries. The Indian Lingam was the union of both, as
were the boat and mast and the point within a circle: all of which
expressed the same philosophical idea as to the Union of the two great
Causes of Nature, which concur, one actively and the other passively, in
the generation of all beings: which were symbolized by what we now term
_Gemini_, the Twins, at that remote period when the Sun was in that
Sign at the Vernal Equinox, and when they were Male and Female; and of
which the Phallus was perhaps taken from the generative organ of the
Bull, when about twenty-five hundred years before our era he opened that
equinox, and became to the Ancient World the symbol of the creative and
generative Power.
The Initiates at Eleusis commenced, Proclus says, by invoking the two
great causes of nature, the Heavens and the Earth, on which in
succession they fixed their eyes, addressing to each a prayer. And they
deemed it their duty to do so, he adds, because they saw in them the
Father and Mother of all generations. The concourse of these two agents
of the Universe was termed in theological language a _marriage_.
Tertullian, accusing the Valentinians of having borrowed these symbols
from the Mysteries of Eleusis, yet admits that in those Mysteries they
were explained in a manner consistent with decency, as representing the
powers of nature. He was too little of a philosopher to comprehend the
sublime esoteric meaning of these emblems, which will, if you advance,
in other Degrees be unfolded to you.
The Christian Fathers contented themselves with reviling and ridiculing
the use of these emblems. But as they in the earlier times created no
indecent ideas, and were worn alike by the most innocent youths and
virtuous women, it will be far wiser for us to seek to penetrate their
meaning. Not only the Egyptians, says Diodorus Siculus, but every other
people that consecrate this symbol (the Phallus), deem that they thereby
do honor to the Active Force of the universal generation of all living
things. For the same reason, as we learn from the geographer Ptolemy, it
was revered among the Assyrians and Persians. Proclus remarks that in
the distribution of the Zodiac among the twelve great Divinities, by
ancient astrology, six signs were assigned to the male and six to the
female principle.
There is another division of nature, which has in all ages struck all
men, and which was not forgotten in the Mysteries; that of Light and
Darkness, Day and Night, Good and Evil; which mingle with, and clash
against, and pursue or are pursued by each other throughout the
Universe. The Great Symbolic Egg distinctly reminded the Initiates of
this great division of the world. Plutarch, treating of the dogma of a
Providence, and of that of the two principles of Light and Darkness,
which he regarded as the basis of the Ancient Theology, of the Orgies
and the Mysteries, as well among the Greeks as the Barbarians,--a
doctrine whose origin, according to him, is lost in the night of
time,--cites, in support of his opinion, the famous Mystic Egg of the
disciples of Zoroaster and the Initiates in the Mysteries of Mithras.
To the Initiates in the Mysteries of Eleusis was exhibited the spectacle
of these two principles, in the successive scenes of Darkness and Light
which passed before their eyes. To the profoundest darkness, accompanied
with illusions and horrid phantoms, succeeded the most brilliant light,
whose splendor blazed round the statue of the Goddess. The candidate,
says Dion Chrysostomus, passed into a mysterious temple, of astonishing
magnitude and beauty, where were exhibited to him many mystic scenes;
where his ears were stunned with many voices; and where Darkness and
Light successively passed before him. And Themistius in like manner
describes the Initiate, when about to enter into that part of the
sanctuary tenanted by the Goddess, as filled with fear and religious
awe, wavering, uncertain in what direction to advance through the
profound darkness that envelopes him. But when the Hierophant has opened
the entrance to the inmost sanctuary, and removed the robe that hides
the Goddess, he exhibits her to the Initiate, resplendent with divine
light. The thick shadow and gloomy atmosphere which had environed the
candidate vanish; he is filled with a vivid and glowing enthusiasm, that
lifts his soul out of the profound dejection in which it was plunged;
and the purest light succeeds to the thickest darkness.