assistants received him, rubbed his limbs, beat
his back, stripped him of his garments and put a new dress on him,
and finally presented him to the society in full consciousness as
a member.36

All the Mysteries were funereal. This is the most striking single
phenomenon connected with them. They invariably began in darkness
with groans and tears, but as invariably ended in festive triumph
with shouts and smiles. In them all were a symbolic death, a
mournful entombment, and a glad resurrection. We know this from
the abundant direct testimony of unimpeachable ancient writers,
and also from their indirect descriptions of the ceremonies and
allusions to them. For example, Apuleius says, "The delivery of
the Mysteries is celebrated as a thing resembling a voluntary
death: the initiate, being, after a manner, born

36 Travels in the Interior of North America, ch. vii.

again, is restored to a new life." 36 Indeed, all who describe the
course of initiation agree in declaring that the aspirant was
buried for a time within some narrow space, a typical coffin or
grave. This testimony is confirmed by the evidence of the ruins of
the chief temples and sacred places of the pagan world. These
abound with spacious caverns, labyrinthine passages, and curious
recesses; and in connection with them is always found some
excavation evidently fitted to enclose a human form. Such hollow
beds, covered with flat stones easily removed, are still to be
seen amidst the Druidic remains of Britain and Gaul, as well as in
nearly every spot where tradition has located the celebration of
the Mysteries, in Greece, India, Persia, Egypt.37

It becomes a most interesting question whence these symbols and
rites had their origin, and what they were really meant to shadow
forth. Bryant, Davies, Faber, Oliver, and several other well known
mythologists, have labored, with no slight learning and ingenuity,
to show that all these ceremonies sprang from traditions of the
Deluge and of Noah's adventures at that time. The mystic death,
burial, and resurrection of the initiate, they say, are a
representation of the entrance of the patriarch into the ark, his
dark and lonesome sojourn in it, and his final departure out of
it. The melancholy wailings with which the Mysteries invariably
began, typified the mourning of the patriarchal family over their
confinement within the gloomy and sepulchral ark; the triumphant
rejoicings with which the initiations always en