us
festivals of Egypt. He explains the rites in commemoration of
Typhon's murder of Osiris as symbols referring to four things, the
subsidence of the Nile into his channel, the cessation of the
delicious Etesian winds before the hot blasts of the South, the
encroachment of the lengthening night on the shortening day, the
disappearance of the bloom of summer before the barrenness of
winter.18 But the real interest and power of the whole subject
probably lay in the direct relation of all these phenomena,
traditions, and ceremonies to the doctrine of death and a future
life for man.

In the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the legend, ritual, and
doctrine were virtually the same as the foregoing. They are
credulously said to have been established by Zoroaster himself,
who fitted up a vast grotto in the mountains of Bokhara, where
thousands thronged to be initiated by him.19 This Mithraic cave
was an emblem of the universe, its roof painted with the
constellations of the zodiac, its depths full of the black and
fiery terrors of grisly hell, its summit illuminated with the blue
and starry splendors of heaven, its passages lined with dangers
and instructions, now quaking with infernal shrieks, now breathing
celestial music. In the Persian Mysteries, the initiate, in
dramatic show, died, was laid in a coffin, and

16 Wilkinson, Egyptian Antiquities, series i. vol. i. ch. 3.

17 De Civitate Dei, lib. vi. cap. 10.

18 De Is. et Osir.

19 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum. Tertullian, Prescript. ad Her.,
cap. xl., where he refers the mimic death and resurrection in the
Mithraic Mysteries to the teaching of Satan.

afterwards rose unto a new life, all of which was a type of the
natural fate of man.20 The descent of the soul from heaven and its
return thither were denoted by a torch borne alternately reversed
and upright, and by the descriptions of the passage of spirits, in
the round of the metempsychosis, through the planetary gates of
the zodiac. The sun and moon and the morning and evening star were
depicted in brilliant gold or blackly muffled, according to their
journeying in the upper or in the lower hemisphere.21

The hero of the Syrian Mysteries was Adonis or Thammuz, the
beautiful favorite of Aphrodite, untimely slain by a wild boar.
His death was sadly, his resurrection joyously, celebrated every
year at Byblus with great pomp and universal interest. The
festival lasted two days. On the first, all things were clad i