From strength to strength advancing—only he,
His soul well-knit and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”
But this proud doctrine vowed to final destruction the mass of humble men, the multitude of the miserable, that is to say, those who, because they endured most in this world, must most aspire to seek in another the happiness which was here denied them and the retribution which should repair the injustice of their earthly lot. This doctrine of the immortality of the few made low station in life a misfortune which was prolonged beyond the grave. To the immense company of the wretched, who suffered without consolation, the religions of the East brought a “better hope,” the assurance that by certain secret rites the mystic, whatever his rank, whether senator or slave, might obtain salvation. The virtue of the liturgical ceremonies made him equal to the immortals (ἀπαθανατίζειν). This was the secret of the rapid spread of these exotic cults in the Latin world.
Every day the stars disappear beneath the horizon to reappear in the east on the morrow; every month a new moon succeeds the moon whose light has waned; every year the sun is reborn to new strength after his fires have died away; every winter vegetation withers to bloom again in the spring. The gods of nature—Attis, Osiris, Adonis—also rose again after they had been slain; the gods of the stars resumed their glowing ardour after darkness had overwhelmed them. Their essential quality was to be for ever “living” or “unconquered” (invicti). Their career was a perpetual triumph over death. The struggle implied was, under the influence of dualism, recognised to be an unceasing battle between two powers disputing possession of the world. Thus the mystic who had become god, who had part in the divine energy, also acquired the power to conquer death. Oriental religions looked upon earthly existence as a fight from which the just man issued victorious. Immortality was a triumph won over the powers of evil, of which the most implacable was death. The souls of the elect were crowned like athletes and soldiers; their wreath was the “crown of life,” often represented on funeral monuments.[[272]] The Greeks sometimes, and the Etruscans frequently, had personified death as a horrible monster who frightened those whom he approached. But the idea of making death into the adversary of mankind, from whose empire pious and strong souls might escape, spread only with the reception of the Oriental beliefs.
This mythological conception of salvation was combined in the mysteries with another, which was more scientific, that of fatalism, which was the chief dogma imposed by astrology on the Roman world. Death is for man the most inevitable and the hardest necessity. Fatum often denotes the unalterable term of life; and this end, which diviners could foresee but could not delay, ought, according to the law of our kind, to overtake the soul as well as the body. But the Oriental cults never ceased to claim that the celestial powers who escaped the rule of Destiny, which extends only to the sublunary world, were also able to withdraw thence their faithful followers. As the emperor was not subject to Fate because he was god, so he who had been initiated and had acquired the same quality was, as a funeral inscription expressed it, “exempt from the lot of death.”[[273]] Those who had taken part in the occult ceremonies of the sect and were instructed in its esoteric doctrines were alone able to prolong their existence beyond the term fixed by the stars at their birth. By the virtue of these rites pious souls were withdrawn from this fate-ridden earth and were led, enfranchised from their servitude, to a divine world.
Thus those who had acceded to a religious initiation obtained eternal life, like the great men whose celestial origin had predestined them thereto. By what rites was wrought this “deification” (ἀποθέωσις), or rather this “immortalisation” (ἀπαθανατισμός)?
The soul, enclosed in the body, was by its very contact with matter exposed to pollution, “as pure and clear water poured into the bottom of a muddy well is troubled.”[[274]] The mysteries never conceived the soul as absolutely immaterial: it was a subtle and light essence, but one coarsened and weighed down by sin, which thus altered its divine nature and caused its decomposition and loss.[[275]] In order therefore that immortality might be ensured to the soul, it must be cleansed of its stains. The pagan religions employed a whole set of ablutions and purifications for restoring his first integrity to the mystic. He could wash in consecrated water in accordance with certain prescribed forms. This was in reality a magic rite: the cleanliness of the body wrought by sympathy a veritable disinfection of the inner spirit, the water clearing off its taints or expelling the evil demons which caused pollution. Or else the initiate sprinkled himself with or drank the blood either of a slaughtered victim or of the priests themselves. These rites arose from the belief that the fluid which flows in our veins is a vivifying principle, able to communicate new existence.[[276]] The man who had received baptism by blood in the taurobolium was reborn for eternity (in aeternum renatus),[[277]] and when, foul and repulsive, he left the sacred ditch, he was adored as a god by those present. Elsewhere purifications by air and fire were found united to that by water, so that the different elements all had part in the purgation.[[278]] All these cathartic ceremonies had the effect of regenerating him who submitted to them, delivering him from the domination of the body, making him a pure spirit, and rendering him fit to live an immaculate and incorruptible life.
A similar belief in a transference to the soul of bodily effects partially explains why unctions were still employed in the liturgy of the mysteries. By rubbing himself with perfumed oil the wrestler in the palaestra and the bather after the perspiration of the sweating-room strengthened their limbs and rendered them supple. Ancient medical science deals at great length with the propitious action of numerous ointments, and by their means magic worked not only sudden cures but also prodigious metamorphoses. The aromatic unguents, which had marvellous antiseptic qualities, served to ensure the conservation of an embalmed corpse. Similarly, in the cult of the mysteries, unctions gave the soul an increase of spiritual force and made it capable of prolonging its existence for ever. As rubbing with unctuous substances was a practice of the thermae, so it was of the temples after the liturgical bath. In the anointing of kings and the ordination of priests they communicated to man a divine character and higher faculties, and this idea has been preserved down to modern times. But, above all, as ointments preserved mortal remains from putrefaction, so the consecrated oil and honey became a means by which the soul was rendered incorruptible and immortality was bestowed upon it.