led to the pious terrors of the public, as well as to its ignorance
and appetite for marvels. They offered nothing pleasant, nothing to
love, nothing to gladden the heart and lift it up in joyful gratitude,
true adoration, and childlike confidence, prayer, and thanksgiving. On
the contrary, awful noises, fearful sights, frightful threats, foaming
at the mouth, dark sayings, secret processions, bloody sacrifices, grim
priests, costly offerings, sleeps in darksome caverns to wait for a
dream from the god--these were the machineries of the ancient heathen.
They were as crude and as ferocious as those of the King of Dahomey, or
of the barbarous negroes of the Guinea coast. But they often show a
cunning as keen and effective as that of any quack, or Philadelphia
lawyer, or Davenport Brother, or Jackson Davis of to-day.

The most prominent of the heathen humbugs were the mysteries, the
oracles, the sibyls (N. B., the word is often mis-spelled sybils,) and
augury. Every respectable Pagan religion had some mysteries, just as
every respectable Christian family has a bible--and, as an ill-natured
proverb has it, a skeleton. It was considered a poor religion--a one
horse religion, so to speak--that had no mysteries.

The chief mysteries were those of the Cabiri, of Eleusis, and of Isis.
These mysteries used exactly the same kind of machinery which proves so
effective every day in modern mysteries, viz., shows, processions,
voices, lights, dark rooms, frightful sights, solemn mummeries,
striking costumes, big talks and preachments, threats, gabbles of
nonsense, etc., etc.

The mysteries of the Cabiri are the most ancient of which anything is
known. These Cabiri were a sort of "Original old Dr. Jacob Townsends" of
divinities. They were considered senior and superior to Jupiter,
Neptune, Plato, and the gods of Olympus. They were Pelasgic, that is,
they belonged to that unknown ancient people from whom both the Greek
and the Latin nations are thought to have come. The Cabiri afterward
figured as the "elder gods" of Greece, the inventors of religion, and of
the human race in fact, and were kept so very dark that it is not even
known, with any certainty, who they were. The ancient heathen gods, like
modern thieves, very usually objected to pass by their real names. The
Cabiri were particularly at home in Lemnos, and afterward in Samothrace.

Their mysteries were of a somewhat unpleasant character, as far as we
know them. The candidat