CHAPTER XII

THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
I HAVE already endeavoured to show what is the dis- tinction between theosophic and religious teaching, and why, though widely different in some respects, they are not in any real sense antagonistic. A further step along the same line of thought, leads us to the con- clusion that till a recent period of the world's history, theosophic and religious teaching went hand in hand — that one was the complement and crown of the other. That the teachings of what used to be called Initiation in the era of the Egyptian and Grecian Mysteries were closely identified with what we now call Theosophy, is a con- clusion that reveals itself with something approaching certainty when the records that we possess, such as they are, concerning the ancient Mysteries, are examined in the light of now current expositions of theosophic doctrine. Nor must we be misled in estimating the im- portance of this fact by the easily suggested idea that the Mystery teaching may have been superseded by the Christian revelation-r-though all very well in its way, while the world at large had to be content with heathen polytheism. The Mystery teaching was not superseded by the Christian revelation, for the author of that revelation constantly alludes to it as embodying a higher instruction than that offered to the multitude even by Him.
The supersession of esoteric teaching by that of modern Christian doctrine was effected not by the original Teacher or his disciples, but by the Church when that became a State organisation with worldly interests to serve, and arrogated to itself a spiritual despotism, by pretending to a monopoly of spiritual knowledge.
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This pretence has been emphasised more and more in modern centuries in inverse proportion to the spiritual knowledge really possessed by the priesthood. And, indeed, in looking back on the claims to superior spiritual knowledge evidently advanced by the priesthood in early ages of the world, we are apt to measure those claims by reference to the painfully -familiar fact that priests in modern centuries have not been at all remarkable for the possession of knowledge in advance of their lay con- temporaries. On the contrary, the early European Church has been in the rear of intelligence in almost all respects, and the claims of its hierarchy on the reverence of the multitude have depended on appeals to a very crude super- stition or on mundane tyranny. As our survey, however, is pushed back further and further into the past, we get well behind the records of an ignorant and worldly church to periods at which the priesthood was evidently regarded as actually invested with an insight into the mysteries of Nature far transcending that generally diffused throughout secular society. The priests of ancient Egypt were real spiritual teachers, and the inferences of those who study Egyptian antiquities by the light of modern inquiries into occult science will surely tend in the direction of recognis- ing them as endowed with the spiritual enlightenment that carries with it an abnormal control over natural forces.
We do not know, or at all events we are not helped by literary and archaeological research to know, very much about the " Mysteries " and initiations of Ancient Egypt, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson frankly concedes that our only clue to their character and significance is to be sought for in th€ somewhat fuller information we possess con- cerning the Greek Mysteries of Eleusis, which were evidently copied from Egyptian practices. But it is quite
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plain that Egyptian initiations were so serious in their character — hedged round from profane intrusion with such jealous care, and approachable only through probations and ordeals of so formidable a description that the outer world must have been entirely sure of the broad principle that the Hierophants of the temples were on a truly superior level of knowledge and power, as compared with the mul- titude. If they had been merely the exponents of a pom- pous ecclesiastical ceremonial, candidates for their teaching would not have besieged their strongholds with the eager- ness actually shown, and would not have been prepared to go through the trials they certainly underwent in their efforts to secure admission to the charmed circle of enlightenment. Even the Mysteries of Eleusis, which were according to all reasonable conjecture a very degenerate reproduction of the more ancient organisation of Egypt, were open, as far as we know anything of their details, to a highly philosophical interpretation. Thomas Taylor, the indefatigable translator of so much Platonic and Neo-Platonic literature, says in his own dissertation on the Mysteries, that those of the " lesser " order " occultly signified this sublime truth, that the soul being merged in matter, resides among the dead both here and hereafter." And quoting Plotinus, he adds, " The soul therefore dies through vice as much as it is possible for the soul to die; and the death of the soul is, while merged or baptised as it were in the present body, to descend into matter and be filled with its impurity, and after departing from this body, to be absorbed in its filth till it returns to a superior condition, and elevates its eye from the overwhelming mire."
Later on, dealing with the subject of the greater Mysteries, he says : " As the shows of the lesser mysteries
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occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in sub- jection to the body, so those of the greater obscurity inti- mated by mystic and splendid visions the felicity of the soul, both here and hereafter, when purified from the defile- ments of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual vision."
Dr. Warburton, who was Bishop of Gloucester in the middle of the last century, is sometimes referred to as a writer of authority on the ancient Mysteries; but his views are too much entangled with conventional orthodoxy to have any real value. He labours, indeed, to show that the Mysteries were designed to teach the Unity of God, as contrasted with the polytheism of popular theology in pre- Christian ages. But Thomas Taylor loftily rebukes the narrowness of this conception. After expanding the ideas above indicated, he goes on : " From hence the reader will easily perceive the extreme ridiculousness of Dr. War- burton's system — that the grand secret of the Mysteries consisted in exposing the errors of polytheism, and in teach- ing the doctrine of the Unity, or the existence of one Deity alone. . . . But it is by no means wonderful that men who have not the smallest conception of the true nature of the gods, who have persuaded themselves that they were only dead men deified, and who measure the understandings of the ancients by their own, should be led to fabricate a system so improbable and absurd."
As showing how very far the initiations went beyond being a mere theoretical repudiation of popular error, Taylor quotes two passages as follows. The first is from Apuleius, who says, describing his own experiences in the mysteries : " I approached the confines of death, and treading on the threshold of Proserpine, and being carried through all the elements, I came back to my pristine
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situation. In the depths of midnight I saw the sun glitter- ing with a splendid light, together with the infernal and supernal gods, and to these divinities approaching nearer I paid the tribute of profound adoration." The second passage is from Plato, who in the " Phaedrus " describes the felicity of the virtuous soul, prior to its descent, in a beauti- ful allusion to the arcane visions of the mysteries. He writes : " But it was then lawful to survey the most splendid beauty when we obtained, together with that blessed choir, this happy vision and contemplation. . . . And these Divine orgies were celebrated by us while we possessed the proper integrity of our nature, and were freed from the molestations of evil, which availed us in a succeeding period of time. Likewise in consequence of this Divine initiation we became spectators of entire simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light, and were ourselves pure and immaculate and liberated from this surrounding vestment which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell."
The Mysteries of Bacchus were held by Taylor to be of somewhat limited significance compared with those of Eleusis.
" And thus much for the Mysteries of Bacchus, which as well as those of Ceres relate in one part to the descent of a partial intellect into matter, and its condition while united with the dark tenement of body; but there appears to be this difference between the two — that in the fable of Ceres and Proserpine the descent of the whole rational soul is considered, and in that of Bacchus the distribution and procession of that supreme part alone of our nature, which we properly characterise by the appellation of intellect. In the composition of each we may discern the
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same traces of exalted wisdom and recondite theology — of a theology the most venerable of all others for its antiquity, and the most admirable for its excellence and reality."
What we may also perceive from the evidence afforded by such passages as those quoted from Apuleius and Plato, is that the Mysteries were associated with the exercise of what we should now call psychic powers and faculties. And with this clue, aided by the growing knowledge in modern times of the extent and range that may be assigned to such faculties, we may begin to appreciate the whole situation more intelligently than has been possible till now.
From the Egyptian period downward, and in a greater degree in the Egyptian as compared with the Greek period, the Mysteries and initiations connected with them were systems of teaching and graduation in that occult science which has been built up through the ages by the prolonged exercise of psychic faculties that are still available for those who know how to employ them as a means of verifying the knowledge thus accumulated in the world. To a very large extent during the development of modern civilisation those faculties have been stifled and forgotten in the activity imparted to others of a purely physical character; but now in all directions even Western civilised nations are fermenting with a revival of psychic activity. Much of this energy is blindly and ignorantly misdirected, but it is working in all its manifestations to break down the dogged materialistic incredulity that has been in a supreme degree the discreditable characteristic of the last half century. That incredulity has pervaded secular science, giving its avowed agnosticism an almost atheistic bias and has dried up the life-blood of religion, leaving the churches a structure of dry bones for all but enthusiasts,
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whose instincts of piety have adorned them with poetic rather than spiritual attributes. Rituals may be preserved, but the creeds on which they profess to rest are no longer in touch with methods of spiritual research which might invest their priestly guardians with authority to utter them. They are handed down now from generation to generation with a bigoted tenacity that is all the more querulous because it is conscious of its own inability to- trace them back to their supposed sources in the invisible realms of Nature. A clergy rich in professions but poor in faith joins hands with scientific materialism to dis- countenance the theory that embodied human conscious- ness can have any touch with the spiritual world. A withered theology preserved like the petals of dried flowers may, it no doubt feels, do better service to a church with a complicated sociological structure to take care of, than i progressive and vitalised scheme of spiritual investigation.
Neither clerical interests nor materialism, however, can hold their own against the growing conviction that the human race is in possession of faculties capable of piercing the veil of matter. Once recognising this as a permanent fact in Nature, we are relieved from the necessity of trying to escape, by fantastic conjectures, from the plain evidence of contemporary writers that the Mysteries of Greece, and, a fortiori, those of Egypt, were associated with a psychic revelation for those who were initiated.
This point is well sustained by a Russian writer, Ouvaroff, whose treatise on the Eleusinian Mysteries has been translated into English by J. D. Price (1817).
The first edition of the original was published in 1812. In his preface the author says : —
" My object in this work is to show that not only were the ancient mysteries the very life of polytheism, but
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still more that they proceeded from the sole and true source of all the light diffused over the globe."
He traces the Mysteries to an Indian origin, relying on the identity of the words Kov£, 'O/z, IIa£ = Conx, Om, Pax, used at the conclusion of the Mysteries of Eleusis, with the Sanscrit Cansha, Om, Pacsha, the first word signifying " object of desire," the second being the familiar sacred syllable of the East, and the third, Pachsha, identical with the Latin vix — change, course, or turn of duty.
After describing the division of the Mysteries into lesser and greater, he goes on : —
" We must again acknowledge the impossibility of deter- mining with precision the notions which the Epopts (the initiatees of the greater Mysteries) received; but that con- nection which we have ascertained between the initiations and the true source of all our knowledge suffices to prove that they hot only acquired from them just notions respect- ing the Divinity — the relations between man and the Divinity — the primitive dignity of human nature — its fall — the immortality of the soul — the means of its return towards God, and finally another order of things after death, but that traditions were imparted to them, oral and even written, precious remains of the great shipwreck of humanity."
He also contends with great force : —
" It is not in fact probable that the superior initiation was limited to the demonstration of the Unity of God and the immortality of the soul by philosophical argu- ments. Clement of Alexandria expressly says, when speaking of trie great Mysteries, ' Here ends all instruc- tion; we behold Nature and things.' Besides, moral notions were so widely diffused that the Mysteries could
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not, merely on account of them, lay claim to the magni- ficent eulogiums bestowed by the most enlightened per- sonages of antiquity. For if we suppose that the revelation of those truths had been the only object of the Mysteries, would they not have ceased to exist from the moment when those truths were publicly taught ? Would Pindar, Plato, Cicero, Epictetus have spoken of them with such admiration if the Hierophant had satisfied himself with loudly proclaiming his own opinions, or those of his order, on truths with which they were themselves acquainted ? v
It is often urged by writers who would disparage the Mysteries that they were sometimes associated with licentious excesses. This objection has especial reference to the Orphic Mysteries, and on this subject Ouvaroff writes : —
" We have already mentioned that the Mysteries of Bacchus bear a character altogether different from that of the Eleusinian. This opposition strikes us at once, and what conformity could in fact subsist between the savage licentiousness of the Bacchus worship and the severe character and high destination of the worship of Ceres ? Yet after a serious examination we find that this opposition consists rather in the exterior than in the spirit of the two worships; nay, it entirely disappears when we raise ourselves to the parent idea, the true type of the two institutions. If we do not obstinately persuade ourselves that Ceres and Bacchus were historical personages — if we consider them as originally two symbols of some power of the universe, we behold them so identified that no other difference exists but in the exterior form, that is in the