sed the existence of a hidden teaching, a secret
doctrine, given under strict and exacting conditions to approved
candidates by the Masters of Wisdom. Such candidates were initiated into
"The Mysteries"--a name that covers in antiquity, as we have seen, all
that was most spiritual in religion, all that was most profound in
philosophy, all that was most valuable in science. Every great Teacher
of antiquity passed through the Mysteries and the greatest were the
Hierophants of the Mysteries; each who came forth into the world to
speak of the invisible worlds had passed through the portal of
Initiation and had learned the secret of the Holy Ones from Their own
lips: each who came forth came forth with the same story, and the solar
myths are all versions of this story, identical in their essential
features, varying only in their local colour.

This story is primarily that of the descent of the Logos into matter,
and the Sun-God is aptly His symbol, since the Sun is His body, and He
is often described as "He that dwelleth in the Sun." In one aspect, the
Christ of the Mysteries is the Logos descending into matter, and the
great Sun-Myth is the popular teaching of this sublime truth. As in
previous cases, the Divine Teacher, who brought the Ancient Wisdom and
republished it in the world, was regarded as a special manifestation of
the Logos, and the Jesus of the Churches was gradually draped with the
stories which belonged to this great One; thus He became identified, in
Christian nomenclature, with the Second Person in the Trinity, the
Logos, or Word of God,[188] and the salient events recounted in the myth
of the Sun-God became the salient events of the story of Jesus, regarded
as the incarnate Deity, the "mythic Christ." As in the macrocosm, the
kosmos, the Christ of the Mysteries represents the Logos, the Second
Person in the Trinity, so in the microcosm, man, does He represent the
second aspect of the Divine Spirit in man--hence called in man "the
Christ."[189] The second aspect of the Christ of the Mysteries is then
the life of the Initiate, the life which is entered on at the first
great Initiation, at which the Christ is born in man, and after which He
develops in man. To make this quite intelligible, we must consider the
conditions imposed on the candidate for Initiation, and the nature of
the Spirit in man.

Only those could be recognised as candidates for Initiation who were
already good as men count goodness, accord