60 Soma. Scipionis.
61 Tusc. Quast., lib. i. cap. xi.
62 Ibid. cap. xvi.
63 Ibid. cap. xxxiv.
64 Ennius, e. g., sings, "Romulus in coelo cum diis agit avum"
Duties of a Priest, "God will raise from darkness and Tartarus the souls of all of us who worship him sincerely: to the pious, instead of Tartarus he promises Olympus." "It is lawful," writes Plato, "only for the true lover of wisdom to pass into the rank of gods." 65 The privilege here confined to philosophers we believe was promised to the initiates in the Mysteries, as the special prerogative secured to them by their initiation. "To pass into the rank of the gods" is a phrase which, as here employed, means to ascend into heaven and have a seat with the immortals, instead of being banished, with the souls of common mortals, to the under world.
In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed to that set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth, and who were called the chthonian gods.66 The hope of immortality first sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship. But in the progress of time and culture the supernal circle of divinities who kept state on bright Olympus acquired a greater share of attention, and at last received a degree of worship far surpassing that paid to their swarthy compeers below. The adoration of these bright beings, with a growing trust in their benignity, the fables of the poets telling how they had sometimes elevated human favorites to their presence, for instance, receiving a Ganymede to the joys of their sublime society, the encouraging thoughts of the more religious and cheerful of the philosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking from the dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and a native longing for admission to the serene pleasures of the unfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction, perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of the old faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, until the hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithful soul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor of the celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of his seventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him in this strain: "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that if you follow us you will be a god and with us will behold our Father." Several learned writers have strenuously labored to prove that the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealed in them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the established theology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods were merely deified men. We believe the real significance of the various collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which these writers have been brought to such a conclusion is this; the genuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the gods were once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teach that Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to tremble at the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete, whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterly absurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligent image of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to live eternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have been a brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and the heart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citation from Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send the bodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuous souls, by nature and the Divine justice, rise from men to heroes, from heroes to genii; and if, as in the Mysteries, they are
65 Phado, sect. lxxi.
66 Muller, Mist. Greek Lit., cap. ii. sect. 5; cap. xvi. sect. 2.
purified, shaking off the remains of mortality and the power of the passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascend from genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the just and established order of nature." 67