f the more religious and cheerful of the
philosophers, these facts, together with a natural shrinking from
the dismal gloom of the life of shades around the Styx, and a
native longing for admission to the serene pleasures of the
unfading life led by the radiant lords of heaven, in conjunction,
perhaps, with still other causes, effected an improvement of the
old faith, altering and brightening it, little by little, until
the hope came in many quarters to be entertained that the faithful
soul would after death rise into the assemblage and splendor of
the celestial gods. The Emperor Julian, at the close of his
seventh Oration, represents the gods of Olympus addressing him in
this strain: "Remember that your soul is immortal, and that if
you follow us you will be a god and with us will behold our
Father." Several learned writers have strenuously labored to prove
that the ground secret of the Mysteries, the grand thing revealed
in them, was the doctrine of apotheosis, shaking the established
theology by unmasking the historic fact that all the gods were
merely deified men. We believe the real significance of the
various collective testimony, hints, and inferences by which these
writers have been brought to such a conclusion is this; the
genuine point of the Mysteries lay not in teaching that the gods
were once men, but in the idea that men may become gods. To teach
that Zeus, the universal Father, causing the creation to tremble
at the motion of his brow, was formerly an obscure king of Crete,
whose tomb was yet visible in that island, would have been utterly
absurd. But to assert that the soul of man, the free, intelligent
image of the gods, on leaving the body, would ascend to live
eternally in the kingdom of its Divine prototypes, would have been
a brilliant step of progress in harmony both with reason and the
heart. Such was probably the fact. Observe the following citation
from Plutarch: "There is no occasion against nature to send the
bodies of good men to heaven; but we are to conclude that virtuous
souls, by nature and the Divine justice, rise from men to heroes,
from heroes to genii; and if, as in the Mysteries, they are

65 Phado, sect. lxxi.

66 Muller, Mist. Greek Lit., cap. ii. sect. 5; cap. xvi. sect. 2.

purified, shaking off the remains of mortality and the power of
the passions, they then attain the highest happiness, and ascend
from genii to gods, not by the vote of the people, but by the just
and e