or him to reveal his experiences to any one unprepared to receive
them.

Plutarch says that the Mysteries gave deep understanding of the true
nature of the daimons. And Cicero tells us that from the Mysteries,
"When they are explained and traced back to their meaning, we learn
the nature of things rather than that of the gods."[3] From such
statements we see clearly that there were higher revelations for the
Mystics about the nature of things than that which popular religion
was able to impart. Indeed we see that the daimons, _i.e._, spiritual
beings, and the gods themselves, needed explaining. Therefore
initiates went back to beings of a higher nature than daimons or gods,
and this was characteristic of the essence of the wisdom of the
Mysteries.

The people represented the gods and daimons in images borrowed from
the world of sense-reality. Would not one who had penetrated into the
nature of the Eternal doubt about the eternal nature of such gods as
these? How could the Zeus of popular imagination be eternal if he bore
within him the qualities of a perishable being? One thing was clear to
the Mystics, that man arrives at a conception of the gods in a
different way from the conception of other things. An object belonging
to the outer world compels us to form a very definite idea of it. In
contrast to this, we form our conception of the gods in a freer and
somewhat arbitrary manner. The control of the outer world is absent.
Reflection teaches us that what we conceive as gods is not subject to
outer control. This places us in logical uncertainty; we begin to feel
that we ourselves are the creators of our gods. Indeed, we ask
ourselves how we have arrived at a conception of the universe that
goes beyond physical reality. The initiate was obliged to ask himself
such questions; his doubts were justified. "Look at all
representations of the gods," he might think to himself. "Are they
not like the beings we meet in the world of sense? Did not man create
them for himself, by giving or withholding from them, in his thought,
some quality belonging to beings of the sense-world? The savage lover
of the chase creates a heaven in which the gods themselves take part
in glorious hunting, and the Greek peopled his Olympus with divine
beings whose models were taken from his own surroundings."

The philosopher Xenophanes (B.C. 575-480) drew attention to this fact
with a crude logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were
enti