aldabaoth, the Lion-headed God, the evil
Jehovah.[147:1] The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly
absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets.

In author after author, in one community after another, the subject
recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we
are the sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still.
We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but
something more unworthy and equally malignant, Chance--to say nothing of
damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no
chance, only Necessity: there is the will of the other six
Kosmokratores, Rulers of the Universe. But above them all there is an
Eighth region--they call it simply the Ogdoas--the home of the ultimate
God,[147:2] whatever He is named, whose being was before the Kosmos. In
this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is
the ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine life which is
man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an +aporroia ton astron+,
an effluence of the stars: it comes direct from the first and ultimate
God, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the
Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in
soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when
their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers
them unterrified: +ego eimi symplanos hymin aster+, 'I am your fellow
wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his
golden scroll the same boast: first, 'I am the child of Earth and of the
starry Heaven'; then later, 'I too am become God'.[148:1] The Gnostic
writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of
the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to
its ultimate home.

That journey awaits us after death; but in the meantime? In the meantime
there are initiations, sacraments, mystic ways of communion with God. To
see God face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared man, sheer death.
But to see Him after due purification, to be led to Him along the true
Way by an initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. It
is to die and be born again. There were regular official initiations. We
have one in the Mithras-Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermeticum.
Apuleius[148:2] tells us at some length, though in guarded language, how
he