Mysteries must have exerted a most extensive and profound
influence alike in fostering the good hopes of human nature
touching a life to come, and in giving credit and diffusion to the
popular fables of the poets concerning the details of the future
state. Much of that belief which seems to us so absurd we can
easily suppose they sincerely embraced, when we recollect what
they thought they had seen under supernatural auspices in their
initiations.

In the Greek and Roman faith there was gradually developed in
connection chiefly with the Mysteries, as we believe an
aristocratic doctrine which allotted to a select class of souls an
abode in the sky as their distinguished destination after death,
while the common multitude were still sentenced to the shadow
region below the grave. As Virgil writes, "The descent to Avernus
is easy. The gate of dark Dis is open day and night. But to rise
into the upper world is most arduous. Only the few heroes whom
favoring Jove loves or shining virtue exalts thither can effect
it." 56 Numerous scattered, significant traces of a belief in this
change of the destination of some souls from the pit of Hades to
the hall of heaven are to be found in the classic authors. Virgil,
celebrating the death of some person under the fictitious name of
Daphnis, exclaims, "Robed in white, he admires the strange court
of heaven, and sees the clouds and the stars beneath his feet. He
is a god now." 57 Porphyry ascribes to Pythagoras the declaration
that the souls of departed men are gathered in the zodiac.58 Plato
earnestly describes a region of brightness and unfading realities
above this lower world, among the stars, where the gods live, and
whither, he says, the virtuous and wise may ascend, while the
corrupt and ignorant must sink into the Tartarean realm.59 A
similar conception of the attainableness of heaven seems to be
suggested in the old popular myths, first, of Hercules coming back
in triumph from his visit to Pluto's seat, and, on dying, rising
to the assembly of immortals and taking his equal place among
them; secondly, of Dionysus going into the under world, rescuing
his mother, the hapless Semele, and soaring with her to heaven,
where she henceforth resides, a peeress of the eldest goddesses.
Cicero expresses the same thought when he affirms that "a life of
justice and piety is the path to heaven, where patriots, exemplary
souls, released from their bodies, enjoy endless happiness amidst
the