ed in the personal experience of the initiate, was the
heart of every one of the secret religious societies of antiquity.

"Here rests the secret, here the keys, Of the old death bolted
Mysteries."

14 Leitch's Eng. trans. of K. O. Muller's Introduction to a
Scientific System of Mythology, Appendix, pp. 339-342.

15 Muller, Introduction to Mythology, pp. 97 and 241. Also his
Dorian, lib. ii. cap. vii. sect. 8.

Perhaps this great system of esoteric rites and instructions grew
up naturally, little by little. Perhaps it was constructed at
once, either as poetry, by a company of poets, or as a theology,
by a society of priests, or as a fair method of moral and
religious teaching, by a company of philosophers. Or perhaps it
was gradually formed by a mixture of all these means and motives.
Many have regarded it as the bedimmed relic of a brilliant
primeval revelation. This question of the origination, the first
causes and purposes, of the Mysteries is now sunk in hopeless
obscurity, even were it of any importance to be known. One thing
we know, namely, that at an early age these societies formed
organizations of formidable extent and power, and were vitally
connected with the prevailing religions of the principal nations
of the earth.

In Egypt the legend of initiation was this.16 Typhon, a wicked,
destroying personage, once formed a conspiracy against his
brother, the good king Osiris. Having prepared a costly chest,
inlaid with gold, he offered to give it to any one whose body
would fit it. Osiris unsuspiciously lay down in it. Typhon
instantly fastened the cover and threw the fatal chest into the
river. This was called the loss or burial of Osiris, and was
annually celebrated with all sorts of melancholy rites. But the
winds and waves drove the funereal vessel ashore, where Isis, the
inconsolable wife of Osiris, wandering in search of her husband's
remains, at last found it, and restored the corpse to life. This
part of the drama was called the discovery or resurrection of
Osiris, and was also enacted yearly, but with every manifestation
of excessive joy. "In the losing of Osiris, and then in the
finding him again," Augustine writes, "first their lamentation,
then their extravagant delight, are a mere play and fiction; yet
the fond people, though they neither lose nor find any thing, weep
and rejoice truly."17 Plutarch speaks of the death, regeneration,
and resurrection of Osiris represented in the great religio