but under it,--in the nether world. He is passing through
Hades. Well for him if he sink not! Happy if a new world open up
before him! Either he dwindles away or he appears to himself
transfigured. In the latter case he beholds a new sun and a new
earth. The whole world has been born again for him out of spiritual
fire.

It is thus that the initiates describe the effect of the Mysteries
upon them. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to
be taken to Hades and to be brought back again by the successors of
Zarathustra. He says that he swam across the great water on his
wanderings, and that he passed through fire and ice. We hear that the
Mystics were terrified by a flashing sword, and that blood flowed. We
understand this when we know from experience the point of transition
from lower to higher knowledge. We then feel as if all solid matter
and things of sense had dissolved into water, and as if the ground
were cut away from under our feet. Everything is dead which we felt
before to be alive. The spirit has passed through the life of the
senses, as a sword pierces a warm body; we have seen the blood of
sense-nature flow. But a new life has appeared. We have risen from the
nether-world. The orator Aristides relates this: "I thought I touched
the god and felt him draw near, and I was then between waking and
sleeping. My spirit was so light that no one who is not initiated can
speak of or understand it." This new existence is not subject to the
laws of lower life. Growth and decay no longer affect it. One may say
much about the Eternal, but words of one who has not been through
Hades are "mere sound and smoke." The initiates have a new conception
of life and death. Now for the first time do they feel they have the
right to speak about immortality. They know that one who speaks of it
without having been initiated talks of something which he does not
understand. The uninitiated attribute immortality only to something
which is subject to the laws of growth and decay. The Mystics,
however, did not merely desire to gain the conviction that the kernel
of life is eternal. According to the view of the Mysteries, such a
conviction would be quite valueless, for this view holds that the
Eternal is not present as a living reality in the uninitiated. If such
an one spoke of the Eternal, he would be speaking of something
non-existent. It is rather the Eternal itself that the Mystics are
seeking. They have first to awaken