ramatic form
and acted it out. It was an age with a gift for manufacturing rites and
liturgies.

+621. Kin yields to religion as social tie.+ This was due to a great
ethnological change which was then coming to its culmination. The kin
tie, which had been the primitive mode of association and coherence of
groups, began to break down in the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It was
superseded by the social tie of a common religious faith and ritual. The
Pythagorean and Orphic sects developed this tie. They had a revelation
of the other world, a system of mystic and cathartic rites, which
cleared men of ritual uncleanness, purified them, and "saved" them. The
cathartic rites were a means of warding off evil spirits and did the
work of the old shamans.[2002] The sectarian brotherhood of the
initiated, the "church," the faith, the contrast of ordinary life with
the ecstatic emotions of the mysteries, the consequent antagonism of the
"flesh" or the "world," and the "spirit," were easy deductions from the
teaching and ritual of the sects.[2003] It was all concentrated in the
godlikeness, divinity, or immortality of the human soul, with the mystic
notions of union between the soul and God. "Mysticism, as doctrine and
theory, grew up from the soil of a more ancient practice in worship."
"The worship of Dionysus must have furnished the first germ of the
belief in the immortality of the soul."[2004] The idea of the Orphic
mysteries was that humanity is suffering and sinful, and must be
initiated in order to wash away its stains and be redeemed from its
sins. Initiation puts a man in communication with the divinity. The soul
is raised by ecstasy to feel its own divinity, which is the deepest
element in all mystic religion. In all this compound of rites and
notions the great antecedent philosophy was not the same as ours. It was
demonism, superstitious anxiety about the world of demons, who floated
around men and stretched their hands out of the surrounding darkness to
seize them. It was from these that men wanted to be "saved." Atonement
was to be made to the chthonic gods, for they were displeased at ritual
uncleanness, and the chthonic cults had the other world in view.[2005]
The uncleanness was ritual, and hence it came from anything far out of
the regular order, either by abomination or holiness. The rabbis held
that the handling of the Scriptures defiled the hands and called for
ceremonial washing (Num. xix. 8, 10).[2006]

+622.