rely
more excellent, and participates of divine love and an immense joy."[20]
By this we gain a divine life, and are rendered in reality divine.[21]

The culminating point of the Mysteries was when the Initiate became a
God, whether by union with a divine Being outside himself, or by the
realisation of the divine Self within him. This was termed ecstasy, and
was a state of what the Indian Yogi would term high Samadhi, the gross
body being entranced and the freed soul effecting its own union with the
Great One. This "ecstasy is not a faculty properly so called, it is a
state of the soul, which transforms it in such a way that it then
perceives what was previously hidden from it. The state will not be
permanent until our union with God is irrevocable; here, in earth life,
ecstasy is but a flash.... Man can cease to become man, and become God;
but man cannot be God and man at the same time."[22] Plotinus states
that he had reached this state "but three times as yet."

So also Proclus taught that the one salvation of the soul was to return
to her intellectual form, and thus escape from the "circle of
generation, from abundant wanderings," and reach true Being, "to the
uniform and simple energy of the period of sameness, instead of the
abundantly wandering motion of the period which is characterised by
difference." This is the life sought by those initiated by Orpheus into
the Mysteries of Bacchus and Proserpine, and this is the result of the
practice of the purificatory, or cathartic, virtues.[23]

These virtues were necessary for the Greater Mysteries, as they
concerned the purifying of the subtle body, in which the soul worked
when out of the gross body. The political or practical virtues belonged
to man's ordinary life, and were required to some extent before he could
be a candidate even for such a School as is described below. Then came
the cathartic virtues, by which the subtle body, that of the emotions
and lower mind, was purified; thirdly the intellectual, belonging to the
Augoeides, or the light-form of the intellect; fourthly the
contemplative, or paradigmatic, by which union with God was realised.
Porphyry writes: "He who energises according to the practical virtues is
a worthy man; but he who energises according to the purifying virtues is
an angelic man, or is also a good daimon. He who energises according to
the intellectual virtues alone is a God; but he who energises according
to the paradigmatic virtues i