These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together with explanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by the peculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among the earliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth as literal history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth once historically exemplified by some traditional personage. It was dramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiation into the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatrical representation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years, of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, his flight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king of the dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ran along the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of the god in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurel from the sacred valley.15 The doctrine of a future life connected with the legend of some hero who had died, descended into the under world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramatically represented in the personal experience of the initiate, was the heart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity.
"Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death bolted
Mysteries."
14 Leitch's Eng. trans. of K. O. Muller's Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342.
15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also his Dorian, lib. ii. cap. vii. sect. 8.
Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grew up naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed at once, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology, by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral and religious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps it was gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives. Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliant primeval revelation. This question of the origination, the first causes and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopeless obscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thing we know, namely, that at an early age these societies formed organizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitally connected with the prevailing religions of the principal nations of the earth.
In Egypt the legend of initiation was this.16 Typhon, a wicked, destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against his brother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest, inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose body would fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhon instantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into the river. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and was annually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But the winds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, the inconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband's remains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. This part of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection of Osiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestation of excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in the finding him again," Augustine writes, "first their lamentation, then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yet the fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weep and rejoice truly."17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration, and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religious festivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration of Typhon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, the subsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of the delicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, the encroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, the disappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness of winter.18 But the real interest and power of the whole subject probably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena, traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a future life for man.
In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, and doctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They are credulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself, who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, where thousands thronged to be initiated by him.19 This Mithraic cave was an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with the constellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black and fiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blue and starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangers and instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathing celestial music. In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, in dramatic show, died, was laid in a coffin, and
16 Wilkinson, Egyptian Antiquities, series i. vol. i. ch. 3.
17 De Civitate Dei, lib. vi. cap. 10.
18 De Is. et Osir.