Chapter II · THE ALEXANDRIAN DIVINITIES

When Alexander’s marshals began immediately after his death to divide his Empire among them, and Ptolemy the son of Lagos claimed and received for his share the province of Egypt, his more ambitious fellows must have smiled at his moderation. Egypt was an acquisition that had never been properly assimilated by the Persians, and although subjugated by Cambyses very early in their history, had more than once broken out into successful rebellion. Its inhabitants, then as now, were a race separated from the rest of the world by peculiarities of climate, devotedly attached to their own traditional institutions, and bitterly and obstinately hostile to the foreigner. Moreover, the enormous resources of the country were undeveloped, the importance of its new capital of Alexandria as the natural entrepôt of trade between East and West^[103] had not then been made manifest, and the agricultural wealth which was afterwards to make Egypt the granary of Europe had been ruined by civil commotions and foreign invasions. Although Alexander was hailed by the Egyptians as a deliverer, and, like other conquerors before and after him, found little difficulty in coming to terms with the colleges of greedy and unpatriotic priests who were ready to welcome any foreign master so long as their own position was assured^[104], he seems to have felt less interest in the unwarlike and servile fellahin than in the free warriors of Bactria and India who had fought so gallantly against him. Hence, he paid little 29attention to their government, and Cleomenes, the ruler he had set over Egypt, thus found himself free to practise extortion on a scale which would certainly have brought down upon him the condign vengeance of his master had it taken place further east^[105]. Or perhaps the Great Conqueror, among whose gifts the habit of attending to everything in its turn must certainly be reckoned, thought it well to let all things grow together till the harvest, in the consciousness that the campaign in Arabia, on which he was bent when struck down by the fatal fever, would bring him close to the confines of Egypt and therefore in a position to investigate on the spot the complaints against Cleomenes which had already come to his ears. Be this as it may, one of Ptolemy’s first acts on reaching his satrapy was to seize Cleomenes and to put him to death, a proceeding which had, we learn, the full approval of his new subjects. This was but the earliest of a long list of benefits which his rule was to confer upon them, and which under his successors were to raise Egypt to a greater height of prosperity than she had ever enjoyed under her native Pharaohs.

It soon became evident also, that in choosing Egypt for his portion Ptolemy knew very well what he was about. While its western frontier was the Libyan desert and its southern was guarded by the cataracts, its northern coast was so badly off for harbours as to make it difficult to attack by sea, and it was practically unassailable from the east save at the Pelusiac or Port Said mouth of the Nile, and then only by an enemy marching through Syria^[106]. Ptolemy, therefore, had ample time to consolidate his power by annexing Cyrene, making friends in his turn with the Egyptian priesthoods, and spending the money raised by Cleomenes’ exactions in the enlistment of an army of mercenaries^[107]. He also waylaid the body of Alexander on its way to the tombs of the Macedonian kings at Aegae, and installed it in a splendid sepulchre called the Sema at 30Alexandria, thereby securing to himself, in the opinion of the time, a talisman of great power^[108]. It was not long before the wisdom of these preparations was put to the proof; for, two years after Alexander’s death, Perdiccas, the Regent of the Empire, had the new satrap tried in his absence for treason, and led a great army out of Asia Minor by way of Damascus to attack him. He found Ptolemy waiting for him in force at Pelusium, and after some of the royal troops had gone over to the enemy, and those under Perdiccas in person had suffered a severe repulse near Bubastis, Perdiccas was deposed and murdered^[109]. The new settlement of the Empire which followed at Triparadeisos confirmed Ptolemy in the possession of Egypt, and left him in comparative peace to organize a kingdom which only ended three centuries later with Cleopatra^[110].

Of the able and statesmanlike measures which Ptolemy took towards this end, only one need concern us here. The plan may have been Alexander’s own, for no one was more likely to know Alexander’s later mind than Ptolemy, who had been his master’s companion from his youth, had shared his exile when banished by Philip, and had distinguished himself in India as one of his most trusted lieutenants. It is not impossible that among Alexander’s plans for the government of his Empire, a religion common to both Greek and barbarian may have been included; for it is difficult otherwise to explain the active part that he took in the different religious observances of all his subjects, while the constant inquisitiveness concerning them which he showed can hardly have been merely archaeological^[111]. At all events, soon after Ptolemy found himself secure in the possession of Egypt, he set himself to work to found a religion that should unite both his Greek and his Egyptian subjects in the bonds of a common faith. At first sight, no two things can seem more dissimilar than the religions of the two nations; but there was one point where they drew very near to each other, and it was to this that Ptolemy addressed himself.

31Now religion in Egypt had always been very much in the hands of a professional priesthood who here, as elsewhere in Africa, formed organized corporations greedy for political sway, and sometimes proved more powerful than the king himself^[112]. So far as the monuments show, the first of these corporations in point of time was that of the worshippers of the sun-god Ra, the chief seat of whose worship was Annu, On, or Heliopolis in the Delta. Its members were apparently the religious advisers of the Vth or Pyramid-building Dynasty, and to them must be attributed the earliest or Heliopolitan recension of the Book of the Dead engraved on the walls of the chambers in the Saqqarah Pyramids. This corporation seems to have flourished unchecked until the Hyksos conquest, but was succeeded, when the invaders were cast out, by that of the priests of Amen of Thebes who, after crushing the “heresy” or religious revolt of King Amenhotep IV, gradually became the supreme power in the state, and established the theocracy or rule of the priest-kings, under which Egypt went rapidly down the hill. The decadence was stayed for a time by an uprising of the Libyan mercenaries, who placed their leader Sheshonq or Shishak, Solomon’s suzerain, upon the throne, and thus founded the XXIInd Dynasty. The deposed corporation of Amen thereupon transferred themselves to Ethiopia or Nubia, where they established a theocracy on the model of that at Thebes, and whence they returned later with an army of Sudanese to again enslave their native country. But Piankhi and his Ethiopians found themselves unable to rule Egypt from Napata, and when they finally retired behind the Cataracts, there was a brief but brilliant revival of old Egyptian ideas under the Saite or Philhellene kings of the Delta, who called in Greek and Carian mercenaries to the support of their throne. It was in their time that Herodotus visited the country, and Egypt began 32again to play its part in the stirring events then fast coming upon Western Asia. It seems probable also that under them, the religious corporations, among whom the priests of Ptah of Memphis, one of the oldest of the gods of Egypt, for the first time take a prominent place, regained the influence which they had never wholly lost. Then came the Persian invasion, and although Egypt made more than one successful attempt to shake off the yoke of the foreigners, it was at last riveted firmly on her neck. After the flight of Nectanebo, the last king of the XXXth Dynasty, she was never again ruled by a prince of Egyptian blood^[113].

During this long period—which is often quoted, not without reason, as the classic instance of the evils attending the Priest in Power—the mass of the Egyptian people had clung firmly to the worship of one god whose vogue goes back to very early times. While the rich and powerful were raising temples to Ra and Amen and showering wealth upon their priesthoods, the poorer classes remained faithful to Osiris and the gods of his cycle with such effect that most of the other divinities found it necessary to include him in their own cults. In the very earliest recension of the Book of the Dead, we find Osiris invoked together with Ra in a way that gives no hint that one has any superiority over the other^[114]; in the great recension of the XVIIIth Dynasty, Osiris and Ra, already made into the “king of the gods” by his union with Amen, are said to have “joined souls” and become one^[115]; and in the Saitic period, Osiris became united with Ptah and a very ancient divinity called Seker, in a triune deity called Ptah-Seker-Osiris to whom everyone looked for happiness after death^[116]. So, when the bull Apis came to be 33adored, he was said to be the “life of Osiris,” meaning probably his earthly incarnation^[117], and there is fairly good evidence that Osiris had long before absorbed into himself the personality of several older deities, such as Khent-Amentit “Lord of Amenti,” and Apuat “the opener of the ways^[118].” It is plain, therefore, that the practice of theocrasia which we have seen rife among the Greeks was known to the Egyptians from the very earliest times^[119]. Yet, all this was effected without there ever having been a special priesthood or college of priests of Osiris such as undoubtedly existed in the case of Ra, Amen, and probably Ptah. It seems really a case of the survival of the fittest, or, in other words, of the choice by the Egyptian people of the worship of the god best suited to their wants, in spite of the well-meant attempts of their rulers to draw their attention to other deities.

The reason for this obstinacy of choice is perhaps to be found in the legend or myth of Osiris, which was at once more consistent and more direct in its appeal to human sympathies than those handed down concerning the other gods of Egypt. We are told that Osiris was the first-born of Nut the sky-goddess by Geb the earth-god, that he appeared upon earth as a man among men, and became king of Egypt, which he ruled wisely and well, teaching the Egyptians the art of agriculture, giving them just laws, and instructing them in the proper worship of the gods. Later, he travelled over the whole earth, civilizing and subduing the nations not by force of arms but by persuasion and especially by the art of music which he took with him. On his return, he was entrapped and murdered by his jealous brother Set or Typhon who, with the aid of seventy-two conspirators and an Ethiopian queen called Aso, shut him up in a coffin and threw him into the Nile, by which his body was carried out to sea. 34We further learn that his sister-wife Isis, who had reigned in his stead during his absence, mourned greatly for his loss and wandered far and wide seeking and lamenting him, until she heard from some children that the coffin containing his remains had been carried away by the Tanitic mouth of the Nile. Following this, she found that it had been washed ashore at Byblus in Phoenicia and had been overgrown by a magnificent tamarisk, which the king of the country had had cut down and made into the roof-tree or pillar supporting his house. Then Isis disguised herself as a servant and became the nurse of the king’s son, whom she would have made immortal but for the timidity of his mother, who cried out when she saw the child surrounded by the flames which were to burn away his mortality. On this, the goddess revealed herself, took away the pillar containing the coffin, and attempted to revive the corpse that it contained by her embrace. Afterwards, she gave birth to her son Horus, whom she destined from his cradle to be the avenger of his father. Meanwhile, the murderer Set had seized the throne of Egypt, and while hunting by moonlight came across the corpse of Osiris, which he tore into fourteen pieces, and scattered them throughout the land. Consequently Isis, who was at the time visiting Horus at nurse in her city of Buto, had to begin again her wanderings, sailing over the swamps in a boat of papyrus, and burying the fragments of the body of Osiris wherever she found them. One part, however, she could not find, this having been thrown into the Nile and devoured by fishes; and henceforth Osiris became king of the Underworld, where he rules for ever over the dead, welcoming those who successfully win through the ordeal of the judgment that all must undergo, and providing for them a happy life like that which the rich live on earth, in which agriculture plays a prominent part. Then Horus grew up to man’s estate, and having provided himself with horse, fought three desperate battles with Set, many of whose followers came over to him. But, although he defeated his foe, he did not put an end to his existence, and Set still lives, haunting the deserts and wild places, and even, according to one variant of the story, ruling for a time over the south of Egypt (or perhaps only a part of it), while the sway of 35Horus over the north remained unchallenged. As for the other gods of the cycle, Nephthys, the twin sister and reflection of Isis, was the wife of Set, but preferred to throw in her lot with Osiris, by whom she had a son, Anubis the jackal, the messenger of Osiris, who possessed many of the attributes of the Greek Hermes. So, too, Thoth, the ibis, was the judge who pronounced, or perhaps merely recorded, the final partition or arrangement between Horus and Set, and most of the other members of the Egyptian Pantheon were brought into the cycle one way or the other.

This is the legend of Osiris, as we find it in the tract de Iside et Osiride, which is generally attributed to Plutarch and was certainly written in the first century A.D. It has not been met with earlier in a connected form; but its main incidents are sufficiently corroborated by the monuments of the time to convince us that it fairly represents the popular belief of the Egyptians during the Ptolemaic period^[120]. Plutarch, or the writer who assumed his name, gives us more than one explanation of it coupled with analogies drawn from other mythologies, which exhibit considerable archaeological knowledge and show us how far the comparative study of religions had proceeded even in his time. When he fails, it is generally from lack of acquaintance with the earlier forms of the religions of Egypt, which had evidently become in those days as much a mystery to the priests as to their flocks, and which the labours of modern Egyptologists have but recently begun to recover for us. Looked at by their light, and stripped of its many transparent inconsistencies and anachronisms, it seems plain that the story is not simple but compound, and represents an attempt to fuse together the religious ideas either of different peoples or of the same people at different stages of culture^[121]. In the first place, 36we see in it the animal gods of Egypt—Horus the falcon, Set the unknown animal or scha sacred to him, Anubis the jackal, and Thoth the ibis—whom we now know to have been the totems or rallying-signs of the different tribes who invaded Egypt, probably from other parts of Africa, in predynastic times. The Sches-Hor or Followers of Horus are so often alluded to in early dynastic texts that there can be no doubt that the tribe who had the falcon for their banner were originally the royal or leading tribe of these invaders. The memory of this fact was preserved in the custom, going back to the beginning of the Ist Dynasty, which assigned to the ruler of Egypt on his coronation a special name differing from that by which he was usually known, and borne in a rectangle representing the façade or front of a palace surmounted by a hawk^[122]. Recent excavations at Abydos in Upper Egypt have shown that this custom was only once broken in the long course of Egyptian history, when a king of the IInd or IIIrd Dynasty, whose name is read Perabsen, cast out the falcon from above the srekh or rectangle containing his “hawk” or Horus name, and crowned it instead with the animal representing Set. This breach of conventional usage—whether significant of a political or a religious revolution or of some predominating foreign influence cannot be exactly determined—was healed by his immediate successor Khasekhmui, who bore both the falcon and the Set-animal above his srekh with an inscription proclaiming himself “He who has caused the two gods to be at peace”; after which the rulers of Egypt returned to the hawk-crowned srekh, which was never again abandoned down to the last-known example under the Roman emperors. We may assume then that the fundamental stratum of the Osiris legend was a tradition more or less historical which preserved the memory of a struggle for supremacy occurring in the earliest historical times between the tribes represented by Horus and Set respectively. As the horse was a late comer into Egypt, and seems to have been introduced there by the Bedouins of the Sinaitic peninsula, where Perabsen’s predecessors left their 37inscriptions, we may even read into it the statement that, while the Horus or falcon tribe were helped in the war by Bedouin cavalry, the followers of Set sought aid from the Nubian or “Ethiopian” tribes above the Cataracts^[123].

To this foundation, however, there must have been added a myth conceived by a race in possession of a much higher degree of culture and greater imaginative powers than any with which the predynastic or protodynastic Egyptians can be credited. The earliest gods of Egypt of whom we have any record were, as we have seen, either animals or inanimate objects, a fact which is sufficiently explained by their totemic origin^[124]. But spread throughout the basin of the Mediterranean, we find from the earliest times the worship of a god who was from his birth never anything but a man and a man who suffered a veritable death and passion before his resurrection and deification. Thus, in Crete we have the legend of the infant Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, who was treacherously seized by the earth-born Titans, torn in pieces, and devoured, but was afterwards reborn as Dionysos to reign over gods and men^[125]. So, too, in Cyprus, Syria, and Phoenicia, we hear of Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite, done to death by the boar’s tusk, but returning yearly from the shades to spend part of the year with his mistress. In Asia Minor, again, was told the story of Atys, lover of Cybele, mother of the gods, who fatally mutilated himself in a fit of madness, but after death was resuscitated, and thereafter reigned with Cybele over all Nature. All these three legends bear too close a resemblance to that of Osiris for the four to have grown up independently, and although the point is not free from doubt, it is improbable that Egypt was 38the source from which the others were derived^[126]. No direct connection in ancient times can be traced between Egypt and the inland country of Phrygia, which seems to be the birthplace of the majority of these legends; while it is of great importance to remember that Isis, Osiris’ queen and sister, is represented in the early Egyptian myths as merely a magician or witch cunning in spells^[127], whereas in the Phrygian and Syrian legends the consort of the dying god is the “mother of all living” or in other words Nature herself. It seems therefore probable that the legend of Osiris, like so many other things in Egypt, was African as to its body, but Asiatic or European as to its head.

It was therefore natural that in this legend of Osiris, Ptolemy should find the desired point of contact between the religions of the Egyptians and the Greeks. The religious institution which commanded the most respect among the Greeks of his time was undoubtedly the Mysteries of Eleusis^[128], which were yearly celebrated with a circumstance that drew upon them the attention of the whole Hellenic world. Messengers went forth every year from Eleusis to all countries where Athenians could be found, to proclaim the Sacred Truce that was to ensure peace during the celebration of the Mysteries. Then on the appointed day in September, enormous numbers of Greeks from all parts of the world gathered together in Athens for a festival that lasted for nearly two weeks. First came the assembly of the worshippers and the proclamation of the hierophant that none but those unpolluted by crime and of intelligible speech (i.e. not barbarians) might take part in the Mysteries. Then 39followed the solemn procession when the sacred objects, upon which none but the initiated might look, were brought from Eleusis under strong guard and lodged in the Eleusinion at the foot of the Acropolis, their arrival being formally notified to the priestess of Athena, the tutelary deity of the city. Next was made the proclamation of “To the sea, the initiates!” when all who were to take part in the ceremonies descended to the harbour of Phalerum^[129] to wash themselves and the animals intended for sacrifice in the salt water, in the belief that, as Euripides said, “Sea-waves wash away all sin.” After a time spent in sacrificing and austerities very proper for bringing the worshippers into a receptive state of mind, there was formed the long procession which paced the Sacred Way, twelve miles long, from Athens to Eleusis, beguiling the road with hymns and choruses addressed to Iacchos, the infant Dionysos^[130], who was supposed to lead the procession from his Athenian temple, the Iaccheion, with a pause at the bridge over the Cephisus, where the crowd exchanged coarse jokes and sarcasms in a manner peculiarly Attic. Then came the arrival by night of the procession at the Telesterion or Hall of Initiations at Eleusis, the sky above which was made light by the glare of the torches^[131]. There, after more sacrifices, a sacred banquet, in which it is not impossible that the mystic cyceon or consecrated drink was partaken of, and sacrifices in the temples of Demeter, of Hades, and of Persephone with which the Hall was surrounded, the initiates were shown a sacred drama, like the mystery-plays of the Middle Ages, acted by the priests of the cult, whose office, contrary to the custom of Greek cults generally, was confined to two families in which it was hereditary and highly paid. This drama, the details of which were kept strictly secret and can only be gathered from hints appearing in writers 40of a comparatively late date, seems to have set forth the Rape of Persephone, daughter of Demeter the earth-goddess, who was known and worshipped throughout Greece and her colonies as the teacher of agriculture and giver of laws to mortals. The initiates saw “with their own eyes” the capture of Persephone, when playing with her companions in the sunny fields of Eleusis^[132], by Hades or Pluto the king of the dead, who takes her to his own gloomy abode beneath the earth, and the wanderings of Demeter in search of her lost child. Then they were shown how Demeter came to the house of Celeus, king of Eleusis, how she became nurse to the king’s child Demophoon, and was detected by his mother attempting to burn away his mortal part in the way which the Egyptian legend attributed to Isis^[133]. The next act, probably reserved for epopts or initiates of the second year only, exhibited the union of Zeus with Demeter^[134], and the birth from the latter of a mysterious child in whom some see the Iacchos who conducted the procession from Athens to Eleusis, but who was certainly Dionysos in one or other of his forms^[135]. We know also that the initiates took part in 41wanderings in dark passages and over obstacles and difficulties, which were supposed to give them an idea of the sufferings of the uninitiated dead in the next world, and that they were then restored to upper air in a blaze of brilliant light, were shown the mysterious objects brought with such care from Eleusis to Athens and back again, were given a glimpse of the beatitudes awaiting the dead who had been initiated in their lifetime, and were at the same time instructed in certain mysterious phrases or formulas which it seems fair to conclude they were to treasure as passwords through the realms of Hades^[136]. It seems probable from this that the initiates were supposed to accompany Hermes the Psychopomp or “leader of souls” as the messenger of Zeus to the underworld, there to accomplish the deliverance of Persephone and to witness her restoration to the heavenly regions where she was again united to her sorrowing mother. Finally, there appeared Triptolemus, Celeus’ son and Demeter’s pupil, setting out in his car drawn by serpents to spread the knowledge of agriculture throughout the world, “an ear of corn reaped in silence” being, as we learn from a Christian writer, the “mighty and wonderful and most perfect mystery” exhibited to the highest degree of initiates^[137].

It will be noticed that we have spoken hitherto of initiates; for none might enter the Telesterion unless they had previously been initiated, and two young Acarnanians who unwittingly did so were formally tried for sacrilege and put to death^[138]. This initiation, or entry into the ranks of those privileged to behold these wonderful sights, began at the Little Mysteries, which were celebrated six or seven months before the Great or Eleusinian Mysteries properly so called, at Agra on the left bank of the Ilissus. These mysteries of Agra were under the control of the same sacred families as the Mysteries of Eleusis, for which 42they formed a necessary preparation. They were kept, if possible, even more strictly secret than the Great Mysteries, and the only direct evidence that has come down to us as to their nature tells us that they also took the form of a sacred drama, and that the scenes there enacted were taken from the legend of Dionysos^[139]. This Dionysos, however, was not in the first instance the Theban god of wine born from Semele and celebrated by the poets, but his Cretan namesake Dionysos Zagreus or “the hunter,” who was said to have been begotten by Zeus in the form of a serpent upon his own daughter Persephone, and while still a child was, as has been mentioned above, torn in pieces by the earth-born Titans from jealousy at hearing that the child was to be made the ruler of the world. It was also said that the scattered members of the baby-god were collected by Demeter, put together and revivified, a myth which late researches seem to show was alluded to in the Anthesteria, a festival celebrated in the Dionysion at Athens in the same Anthesterion or “flower month” as the Little Mysteries. There is much reason to think that the Anthesteria showed forth in a manner unintelligible to the beholders unless otherwise acquainted with the details of the legend, the putting-together of the different members—said to be fourteen in number—of the infant Dionysos, his subsequent resurrection, and his marriage with a priestess called “the Queen” who doubtless represented Demeter or Persephone. The inference seems unavoidable that it was some part of this legend that was acted in a manner impossible to misunderstand or mistake before the eyes of those admitted to the Little Mysteries^[140].

43We see then that between the legend of Osiris as told by Plutarch and the legend of Eleusis as set forth in the Mysteries there were resemblances so close as to make it almost impossible that one should not be derived from the other, unless we are prepared to consider them as having a common origin. As Osiris was torn into fourteen pieces, so was Dionysos, the difference in the agents of this “diaspasm,” as it was called, being due to the exigencies of Egyptian traditional history. The wanderings of Isis, again, find an exact parallel in those of Demeter, the object of the search differing slightly in the two cases, while the mysterious birth of Horus, the successor of Osiris, corresponds point for point with that of Dionysos in his second form of Iacchos. That both stories may have had their source in the folk-lore explaining the phenomena of the annual decay and rebirth of vegetation, Dr Frazer has shown with great attention to detail in The Golden Bough and elsewhere^[141] to be possible; but this was too philosophical an idea for the sixth century B.C., when the Mysteries of Eleusis were founded or reduced to order^[142]. Herodotus, a century later, no doubt expressed the views of the learned of his day when he asserted that the worship of Dionysos was brought into Greece from Egypt^[143], and among modern scholars M. Foucart, who has done more than anyone to collate the few relics that remain to us of the Eleusinian worship, fully supports him in this. It 44is therefore plain that the resemblances between the Dionysiae and the Egyptian worship were many and salient. Hence Ptolemy found his way clear when he invited Timotheos the Eumolpid, a member of one of the sacred families in which the Eleusinian priesthood was, as has been said, hereditary, and associated with him the Egyptian priest Manetho in the task of founding a religion which should be common to Egyptians and Greeks alike^[144].

In framing this new religion, the first care of the king and his advisers was evidently to avoid shocking the religious and artistic feelings of the Greeks. Ptolemy Soter’s position seems to have been much like that of a modern Governor-General of India; for, while he was not only tolerant but careful of the religious susceptibilities of the native Egyptians, his own Court remained in everything predominantly or exclusively Greek. In Alexandria, the site of which under the native Pharaohs had been the small fishing village of Rhacotis, he had practically virgin soil, in which it is doubtful whether any Egyptian temple existed, and it was consequently, as Alexander intended it should be, in all respects a Greek city. Greek was the language there spoken, and it was to the care taken by Alexandrian scholars to preserve the language and literature of Hellas in its native purity, that we are indebted for most of what we know of the classic tongue at its best. Its large garrison consisted almost entirely of Greek soldiers drilled and armed in the Macedonian fashion, and to the great University or Museum, which Ptolemy’s munificence founded for the sustentation of scholars, there flocked learned men from every part of the Hellenic world^[145]. Here, indeed, was the first instance of the endowment 45of research; and the experiment had important results for most of the modern sciences, not excluding that transmutation of metals which made such wild work among some of the best brains of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but which Sir William Ramsay has lately shown to be more capable of accomplishment than could have been expected from an alchemist’s dream. At the Museum, Eratosthenes, “the Inspector of the Earth,” first set on foot the serious study of geography, Hipparchus laid the sure foundations of the modern science of astronomy, and Hero invented the first steam engine. The investigation of those secondary laws by which their insight perceived nature to be governed was indeed the constant occupation of King Ptolemy’s “stuffed capons,” as Timon of Phlya contemptuously called them^[146]. But these philosophers would have been the first to receive with scorn the proposition that anyone should be asked to worship the “brutish gods” of Egypt under those animal forms in which they had long been known to the more simple minded Egyptians. Osiris, the “bull of Amenti,” as he is called in the early texts, was worshipped under the actual form of the bull Apis at Memphis and as a ram or goat at Mendes. Isis was often portrayed with the cow’s head which commemorated one of the incidents of her myth as set forth by Plutarch. Horus, who was in fact an older god than either of them, was, as the totem of the royal tribe of the first invaders, worshipped at Edfu and elsewhere as a hawk, and although the Egyptian priests kept up as long as possible the distinction between this “Horus the elder” and Horus the son of Isis, it is certain that their Greek worshippers saw no difference between the two. While Timotheos was doubtless willing to recognize the Eleusinian deities, of whose worship his family were the traditional guardians, in the Egyptian triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, he must have been sure that he could not ask his art-loving countrymen to do them homage in the guise of beasts or birds.

46The difficulty was got over in a way that was characteristic enough. The theocrasia or fusion of one god with another which we have seen playing such a prominent part in the religion of both Egyptians and Greeks, was of the very essence of the religion of Eleusis. At no time from the earliest mention of the Eleusinian worship onwards, is it possible to draw any sharp dividing line between Demeter and her daughter Persephone, or as Mr Louis Dyer rather flamboyantly puts it, Demeter and Persephone were at Eleusis “regarded as one, being so filled with mutual love that all barriers between them melted away^[147].” “Excepting,” he says again, “in her days of thoughtless youth, Demeter’s Persephone is Demeter’s self twice told,” and the same dogma seems to have been prematurely revealed by Xenophanes of Colophon, who was exiled for his declaration that all the gods of his fellow-countrymen were but varying forms of the one deity. This identity of the goddesses of Eleusis must have been constantly present to the mind of the Greeks, who hardly ever spoke of Demeter and Persephone save as “the Goddesses Twain” or as the Mother-and-Daughter. But this was only the first step in what was called without circumlocution the “mystic theocrasia^[148],” which went so far as to include in the persons of the Eleusinian deities nearly all the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. In the original Cretan legend, the infant Dionysos is the son of Zeus, whom he is destined to succeed upon his throne, as Zeus had succeeded in the Homeric myths his father Kronos, and this last, his father Ouranos. But the Zeus of Eleusis was by no means the Zeus of Olympos whom Homer hails as “father of gods and men,” but who had to yield the empire of the seas to his brother Poseidon and that of the netherworld to his brother Hades. Originally known at Eleusis 47as “the God” only, as Demeter with or without her daughter was called “the Goddess,” the Eleusinian god was also invoked as Zeus Chthonios or the infernal Zeus, called by euphemism Zeus Eubuleus (Zeus of Good Counsel), Pluto (Bringer of Riches) and other similar names^[149]. But by whatever name he was called, he was always the king of the dead, and was thus again brought near to Dionysos, whom Heraclitus of Ephesus, two centuries before Alexander, had declared to be the same god as Hades, lord of the netherworld^[150]. In this double capacity, Dionysos was therefore the brother, father, and spouse of his consort Demeter, of whom he was also the child. He might therefore be considered one of the first instances known in the history of religions as a god who was, according to the way in which he was regarded, either father or son^[151]. Nor did the theocrasia stop here. The Asiatic forms of Dionysos, whether we call them Atys, Adonis or by any other name, were often represented as of both sexes, a doctrine which is also denoted by Dionysos’ Orphic epithet of Mise, and led to his being portrayed in effeminate shape^[152]. Hence, Dionysos and Demeter or Persephone might be regarded as the God under both the male and female aspect. Moreover, Zeus was said to have ordered the corpse of Dionysos to be buried at Delphi, where secret ceremonies were celebrated in connection with it by five priests called Hosioi; and this seems to have led to the idea common 48to the classic poets Pindar, Aeschylus, and Euripides, that Dionysos and Apollo were different forms of the same god, a theory which is expressly confirmed by Plutarch^[153]. But Apollo “the Far-Darter” was always to the Greeks a sun-god, and Horus from the first had the same character among the Egyptians, the emblem of the sun-disk being often added to the Horus-hawk of their protocol by the Pharaohs of the New Empire. Thus the identification of the gods of the Osiris cycle with their Greek analogues was complete. It was agreed that Osiris was to be represented as the Greek Hades, Isis as Demeter, and the child Horus as Apollo. Herodotus and probably other Greek writers had long before made the same identifications^[154].

This settled, the question of the material forms under which the triad was to be worshipped by Ptolemy’s new subjects became easy. A convenient dream, so runs the story told in Roman times, revealed to the king the existence of a statue of Hades or Pluto at Sinope in Pontus that was exactly fitted to his purpose^[155]. It is said to have been of colossal size, the work of Bryaxis, the fellow-worker of Scopas, and to have been composed of a mixture of the most precious metals with fragments of gems, the whole being coloured with a dark varnish. This statue was given up by—or according to another version was stolen from—the city of Sinope, and was installed with great pomp in the magnificent temple or Serapeum built for it at Alexandria, which for centuries formed one of the wonders of 49the Hellenistic world. It doubtless formed the model for all the later representations of the new god called henceforth Serapis (in Egyptian, Asar-hapi or Osiris in his manifestation as Apis), which resemble each other in all important particulars. They show a bearded man of mature age, whose features have much of the majesty and dignity of the Phidian Zeus. On his head he wears the modius, a crown of basket-work on which are sometimes represented olive trees and which is said to be a reproduction of the calathos or consecrated basket carried in the sacred procession to Eleusis, and doubtless possessed for the initiated some mystical or symbolical meaning^[156]. He is generally represented with an eagle at his feet, and by the side of him appears a triple monster which may perhaps represent the classical Cerberus with a serpent twisted round its body and equipped with the heads of a lion, a dog, and a wolf. It seems, therefore, that in choosing this statue the founders of the Alexandrian religion had quite turned their backs on the lighter and more joyous aspects of the mystic Dionysos, and intended to regard him as the god of the dead merely^[157]. The same was not the case with his consort Isis, who is generally represented as a young matron of stately appearance having sometimes the crescent moon on her head, and sometimes a crown of lotus flowers interspersed with ears of corn. She is dressed in a fringed tunic reaching to her feet, having over her shoulders a mantle tied by its ends between the breasts in a peculiar knot. In one hand she bears the sistrum or rattle used in her worship, and in the other a horn of abundance or other emblem, while the head is frequently covered by a long veil. Both the attitude and the dress are always of the strictest modesty, and the features wear an expression of gentle 50benevolence, in which it is possible to see a trace of melancholy. The Alexandrian Horus is seldom represented otherwise than in child form, the type being taken from the Egyptian Horus known as Har-pa-khrat (Horus the Child) of which the Alexandrians made Harpocrates. In this form he was represented with his finger in his mouth in accordance with the usual Egyptian ideogram for childhood, and this gave rise to the story among the Greeks that he was the god of silence. Sometimes he is shown with wings like the classical Eros, frequently seated on the lotus or with the lotus flower on his head, and very often with the hawk which formed his proper emblem^[158]. He was seldom represented in a group containing Serapis, although bas-reliefs and statues showing Serapis and Isis together are common; but groups representing Isis suckling Horus have been found in some numbers. Generally it may be said that the modius on the head is the distinguishing mark of the figure of Serapis, the peculiar breast-knot that of Isis, while Horus can seldom be recognized with certainty save by the gesture of the forefinger in the mouth or, as the Greek artists preferred to represent it, on the lips. From this time forward, the Alexandrian Greeks could worship the chief deities of their native fellow-citizens under forms which they felt to be worthy of the Divine.

Thus, the worship of the great Egyptian triad under their Greek forms was inaugurated, as was our own English Reformation in the sixteenth century, as a measure of statecraft, by a king who hardly cared to conceal that in doing so he had only his own interest to serve. Yet it may be said at once, that so far as its political purpose was concerned, the Alexandrian religion was from the outset foredoomed to failure. The Egyptians of Philhellenic times were of all the nations of the earth at once the most superstitious and the most fanatically attached to their traditional modes of worship. Although until the rise of the theocracy, the importation of foreign gods was not unknown, under the Ethiopians, the Persians, and Alexander, the Egyptians had not scrupled to sacrifice their nationality to their religion, and to accept a foreign governor 51so long as the worship of their native gods under types that had been observed by them for more than four millennia remained untouched. How then could they be expected to recognize their native deities in forms beautified and dignified by Greek art indeed, but so foreign to all their traditional ideas that nothing distinctly Egyptian about them remained?

To this question there could be but one answer, and it is not extraordinary that the native Egyptians proved as recalcitrant to their new king’s endeavour to unite them in a common worship with their Greek masters as the Jews did under the somewhat similar attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes. The Egyptian priests allowed Ptolemy to set up at Memphis, which had become since the ruin of Thebes the religious capital of the country, a Serapeum, doubtless modelled on that of Alexandria, by the side of the native temple established for the delectation of the living Apis and for the solemn burial of his predecessors: but they took care that it should be separated from the Egyptian Serapeum by a long avenue of sphinxes, and that no Greek prayers should ever be allowed to defile the purity of the native Egyptian sanctuary^[159]. Moreover, Egypt, resembling in this perhaps all countries with strongly marked geographical characteristics, has exhibited through all ages a wonderful power of conquering her conquerors, or, in other words, of forcing her foreign rulers to accept the ideas that they found there, instead of adopting at their instance innovations on customs consecrated by centuries of usage. Hence the Ptolemies, as time went on, found it necessary to pay ever more and more attention to the native Egyptian religion, and Ptolemy V Epiphanes was crowned at Memphis, as is recorded on the Rosetta Stone, with all the religious ceremonies that made him in the eyes of the Egyptians the living Horus, son of the sun-god, the beloved of Ptah and the rest, as fully as any of the ancient Pharaohs^[160]. All the Ptolemies, too, seem to have spent 52very considerable sums on the restoration and keeping-up of the temples in Egypt dedicated to such thoroughly native gods as Amon of Thebes and Horus of Edfu, besides those at Philae and elsewhere raised not to the Alexandrian but to the Egyptian Osiris and his cycle. What truth there is in the statement of Macrobius that Ptolemy Soter compelled by “tyranny” the Egyptians to take Serapis into their temples, it is impossible to say; but as his image in Greek form has never been found in any of them, it is plain that the priests must have found some way of evading the royal order, if it were really given^[161].

Ptolemy, however, was building better than he knew, and the hybrid cult which the provident old soldier had fashioned as an instrument of government turned out to be the first, and not the least successful, of the world-religions for which Alexander’s conquests left clear the way. During the wars of the Diadochi, all the powers who at any time found themselves Ptolemy’s pawns in the mighty war game then played on a board stretching from India to Thrace, thought to curry favour with their rich ally by giving countenance to his new religion. An association of Sarapiasts or worshippers of Serapis held their meetings in the Piraeus not long after the institution of the Alexandrian cult^[162]; and before the death of Ptolemy Soter, a Serapeum was built in Athens over against the Acropolis itself^[163]. Cyprus, Rhodes, Antioch, Smyrna, and Halicarnassus were not long in following suit, and before the end of the century several of the islands of the Ægean together with Boeotia, which was said by some to be the native country of Dionysos, had adopted the new worship. In the second century B.C., the temples of the Alexandrian gods were to be found in Delos, Tenedos, Thessaly, Macedonia and the Thracian Bosphorus in Europe, and in Ephesus, Cyzicus and Termessus among 53other places in Asia Minor^[164]. But their greatest triumph was awaiting them further west. Invited by Hiero II into Sicily, they were not long in working their way up the coast, and a hundred years before our era a temple to Serapis was in existence at Puteoli^[165]. It was evidently no new foundation and had probably been built some fifty years earlier, at which date perhaps the first Isium at Pompeii was also in existence^[166]. Somewhere about 80 B.C., the Alexandrian worship was introduced into Rome itself, and thereafter no action of the authorities was able to expel it^[167]. Its temples were more than once thrown down by order of the consuls; but they were always rebuilt, and in 43 B.C., the aedile Marcus Volusius, who had been proscribed by the triumvirs, found the linen robe and the dog’s head mask of a priest of Isis the most efficient disguise in which to escape Sulla’s bravos^[168]. Under the Empire, the temple of Isis in the Campus Martius became one of the fashionable resorts of the Roman youth; and, although Tiberius seized the occasion of a real or pretended scandal in connection with it to exile a large number of the faithful to Sardinia, his successors were themselves initiated into the faith; while under Nero the worship of the Alexandrian gods was formally recognized by the state^[169]. From that time, it followed the Roman arms into every quarter of the ancient world, and its monuments have been found in Morocco, Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the Danube provinces. Ridicule was as powerless to stop its march as persecution, and the satire of Juvenal and Martial had no more effect on it than the banter of the New Comedy, which was quick to observe that even in 54Menander’s day the gilded youth of Athens swore “by Isis” or “by Horus^[170].” Under the Antonines, it probably reached its apogee, when the Emperor Commodus appeared in the processions of the cult among the bearers of the sacred images, and few Romans seem to have been aware that the Alexandrian gods were not Roman from the beginning. Like Ptolemy’s master, Ptolemy’s gods might have boasted that they commanded the allegiance of the whole civilized world^[171].

The causes of this astonishing success must be looked for within the religion itself. No name has come down to us of any prophet or priest of the Alexandrian religion possessing a commanding personality like St Paul, Mohammed, Luther, or Calvin; and we must therefore conclude that it was its own intrinsic merits which thus commended it to so many widely-differing peoples^[172]. Foremost among these was, it would seem, its extraordinary timeliness. Alexander’s conquests had broken down the barriers that speech and race had set up between neighbouring peoples, and had at the same time united many hundreds of jealous and discordant states under a single head. In the many royal courts which had been set up as a result of the partition of Alexander’s Empire, philosophers of every school were chanting the political advantages of an enlightened monarchy over the greedy scramble for place and power inseparable from democracy, and the doctrine was bound sooner or later to be applied to religion^[173]. We have seen how far both Egyptians and Greeks had before then carried the practice of theocrasia, but the founders of the Alexandrian religion were not slow in pushing it to its only legitimate conclusion. Serapis, unlike the Greek Zeus, from the first declined to brook any partition of his empire over nature. “Wouldst thou know 55what god I am,” said his oracle at the Alexandrian Serapeum to Nicocreon, the Cypriote king. “I myself will tell thee. The heavenly cosmos is my head; the sea my belly. My feet are the earth; my ears are in the aether. My far-beaming eye is the radiant light of the sun^[174].” In other words, Serapis is himself the universe, which is probably the meaning to be attached to the name given to Osiris in the Book of the Dead which Egyptologists translate “Lord of Totality.” But Aeschylus had already said the same thing about Zeus^[175], and as the gods of the Greeks were never anything else than the powers of nature, Serapis thus comprised in his single person the whole Greek pantheon. Hence “Serapis alone is Zeus” came to be a sort of watchword in the Alexandrian religion to be endlessly repeated on statues, gems, and all the other material relics of the cult^[176]. A little later and we find Serapis drawing to himself the worship of all the Mediterranean gods who had a common origin with Osiris and Dionysos. Adonis, as appears from the beautiful idyll of Theocritus, in the reign of Ptolemy Soter’s successor was worshipped as another form of Osiris in the royal palace itself^[177]. Atys, Cybele’s lover, was also identified with him^[178]; and, as the Stoic philosophy, which taught that all the gods were but different forms of the one Divine energy, 56came into fashion, Serapis was equated with the numerous sun-gods whose worship poured in from the Semitic east. “The eternal sun” came to be one of his most-used epithets, and he is often invoked as the equivalent of the Greek Helios and of the Persian sun-god Mithras^[179]. Nor did his consort long remain behind him. “I, the parent of the works of nature” is the style in which Isis announces herself to her votary Lucius in Apuleius’ romance,

“queen of all the elements, earliest offspring of the ages, highest of godheads, sovereign of the Manes, first of the heavenly ones, one-formed type of gods and goddesses. The luminous heights of heaven, the health-giving breezes of the sea, the sad silences of the lower world, I govern by my nod. I am she whose godhead, single in essence, but of many forms, with varied rites and under many names, the whole earth reveres. Hence the Phrygians, first born of men, call me Pessinuntica, Mother of the Gods; here the first inhabitants of Attica, Cecropian Minerva, there the wave-rocked Cypriotes, Paphian Venus; the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna; the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; the Eleusinians, the ancient goddess Ceres;—others Juno, others Bellona, these Hecate, those Rhamnusia; and they who are lighted by the first rays of the sun-god on his rising, the Ethiopians, the Africans, and the Egyptians skilled in the ancient teaching, worshipping me with ceremonies peculiarly my own, call me by my true name, Queen Isis^[180].”

As we shall see later (p. 64, infra) her spouse Osiris claimed also to be the highest of godheads; and the final unity of the Divine essence to which the μυστικὴ θεοκρασία was logically bound to lead could hardly be stated in clearer language^[181].

57Thus, we see that what has been called a monotheistic pantheism instead of an incoherent mass of local worships was one of the advantages of the Alexandrian cult. But in the religion of the crowd, feeling plays a more important part than reason, and the idea which it first gave mankind of what would be now called the “fatherhood of God” was probably by far its most alluring feature. It has frequently been said that the Greeks although they feared, did not love their gods, and so far as the Homeric deities are concerned, it is difficult to see why they should. Apollo openly expresses his contempt for “pitiful mortals, who like unto leaves now live in glowing life, consuming the fruit of the earth, and now again pine unto death^[182],” Hera does not hide her scorn for “the creatures of a day,” and the help that Athena gives the Greeks in their war against Troy is expressly said to be due to no kindlier feeling than rage at the slight which Paris had put upon her beauty^[183]. As for the Egyptian religion, if it ever exhibited the lofty conceptions and sublime ideas with which the earlier Egyptologists were inclined to credit it, it had long before Ptolemy’s time lost all trace of them, and had degenerated into “a systematized sorcery” in which the gods were compelled to grant merely material benefits directly they were demanded with the proper ritual^[184]. But when we turn from the Greek and Egyptian creeds to the new faith which was compounded from the two, we are at once struck by the complete change which seems to have come over the worshippers’ conception of the Divine. Isis, from the wily magician of Pharaonic Egypt, has now become “the haven of peace and the altar of pity^[185].”

“O thou holy and eternal protectress of the race of men”

are the terms with which Lucius addresses her,

“thou who ever givest good gifts to comfort-needing mortals, thou dost bestow upon the lot of the wretched the sweet affection of a 58mother. There is no day nor night nor smallest moment which is not occupied with thy good deeds. Thou dost protect mankind by sea and land, and scattering the storms of life dost stretch forth to them thy saving hand, with which thou dost even spin anew the hopelessly twisted web of the Fates, and dost temper the blasts of fortune and restrain the hostile courses of the stars^[186].”

So Ælius Aristides in his encomium of Serapis written after having been saved from shipwreck, as he considered, by the direct intervention of the god, tells us that Serapis is the god who “purifies the soul with wisdom, and preserves the body by giving it health^[187],” that he alone

“is adored by kings as by private persons, by the wise as by the foolish, by the great as by the small, and by those on whom he has bestowed happiness as well as those who possess him alone as a refuge from their trouble^[188],”

that he is “the protector and saviour of all men^[189],” “the most loving of the gods towards men^[190],” “greatly turned towards mercy^[191],” and “the light common to all men^[192].” We hardly want his elaborate demonstration that Serapis alone of all the gods is ready to assist him who invokes him when in need, to convince us that the reign of the warlike gods and goddesses of Homer—always, as Renan says, brandishing a spear from the top of an acropolis—is over, and that instead of them man has at last found

... “Gods, the friends of man

Merciful gods, compassionate”

who would certainly “answer him again,” as a father would his children.

The providence and beneficence of the Alexandrian gods towards man, moreover, extended beyond the grave. In Homer, we find a conception of the next world which for dreariness and 59hopelessness is only paralleled by the Jewish ideas concerning Sheol. “Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, great Odysseus,” says the shade of Achilles to the hero who has called him up from Hades. “Rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, even with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead who are no more^[193].” But the Eleusinian Mysteries were hailed as giving deliverance from these horrors, and as robbing death of much of its terrors for those who had been initiated. “Blessed is he,” says Pindar in a passage in which commentators agree to see a direct allusion to the Mysteries, “who has seen the things that are under the earth. He has seen the end of life; he has seen also the God-sent beginning^[194].” “Thrice blessed,” says Sophocles, “are they among mortals, who after having beheld these mysteries, go to the house of Hades: for it is theirs alone there to live, but to the others there will arrive all ills^[195].” The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which may be about a century earlier than Pindar, is as emphatic as he as to the saving grace of initiation. “Happy,” it says, “is the man on earth who has seen these things. But he who has not been initiated in these holy rites, who has not shared in them, never has the same lot, when he has utterly faded away in the dark gloom^[196].” Those who believe with M. Foucart in the Egyptian origin of the Eleusinian rites will doubtless see in this a direct borrowing from the Egyptian views regarding the beatitude awaiting the justified or “triumphant” dead who in life had been worshippers of Osiris. How much or how little of the Osirian faith as to the state of these worshippers in the next world passed into the Alexandrian religion cannot now be said; but it is certain that the protection of Isis and Serapis was held to be as powerful in the life beyond the tomb as in this.

60“When the term of thy life is spent,”

says the apparition of the goddess to Apuleius’ Lucius,

“and thou at length descendest to the lower regions, there also, even in the subterranean hemisphere, thou, dwelling in Elysian fields, will often adore me who art propitious to thee, and whom thou shalt see shining among the shades of Acheron and reigning over the secret places of Styx^[197].”

So, too, Aristides says of Serapis, that he is “the Saviour and leader of souls, leading souls to the light and receiving them again^[198],” that “he raises the dead, he shows forth the longed-for light of the sun to those who see, whose holy tombs contain endless numbers of sacred books^[199],” and that “we can never escape from his sway, but he will save us, and even after death we shall be the objects of his providence^[200].” We may imagine, if we please, although there is really no proof of any connection between the two, that in its assertion of the fatherhood of God as in earthly matters, the Alexandrian religion owed something to the Stoic philosophy; but it is fairly certain that in the glimpses it afforded of the next world, its inspiration must have been drawn either from Eleusis or from Egypt.

What we know, too, of the actual worship of the Alexandrian triad shows that it was designed to attract the devotion of the multitude with a skill that argues the existence behind it of many centuries of priestcraft. It is still a moot point whether Herodotus was well-founded when he asserted the existence of “mysteries” in the Egyptian religion^[201]; and it is quite clear that the scenes in the earthly life of Osiris and the gods of his cycle which in the case of their Greek counterparts were carefully concealed from all but initiates, were in Egypt openly 61portrayed on the walls of the temples^[202]. But Timotheos and Manetho must have been too well aware of the prestige attaching throughout the Hellenic world to the secret worships of such centres of religion as Eleusis and Samothrace to forgo its advantage for their new religion; and the Alexandrian gods too had a system of initiation which seems to have been modelled upon that of the “Goddesses Twain.” Thanks to Apuleius we can, up to a certain point, follow the Alexandrian course of initiation step by step. Those whom Isis singled out as fitted for her service^[203]—which we may without uncharitableness interpret as meaning those whom the priests thought likely to be of use to the religion—were assigned a “mystagogue” who no doubt gave them such instructions as he thought fit in the meaning of the rites which he saw performed in the temple, and the incidents in the life of the gods to which they were attached. When after a course of such instruction, which was of varying length, the mystagogue was convinced of the soundness of the aspirant’s vocation, the formal initiation began. In strict accordance with a ritual which Apuleius assures us was written down in Egyptian characters and carefully preserved in the secret places of the sanctuary (opertis adyti), the aspirant underwent a solemn lustration with water or baptism at the hands of the priest, and was ordered to abstain from all food which had had life, from wine and from the company of the other sex for a space of ten days^[204]. This period was doubtless spent as far as possible within the temple precincts, much importance being attached to the prolonged contemplation of the statue of the goddess, which was, as we have seen, fashioned in a manner worthy of Greek art, and was further adorned with 62rich robes and jewels after the manner of the Catholic images of the Virgin. At the expiration of the ten days’ retreat, the candidate was clothed in a linen garment and was exhibited to the general body or congregation of the faithful who presented him with gifts. The secret ceremonies were then performed before him, the nature of which are only revealed to us in the guarded words of Apuleius’ hero:

“I approached the bounds of death, and, borne through all the elements, returned again to the threshold of Proserpine which I had already trod. I saw at midnight the sun shining with pure light, I came before the Gods of the Upper and Lower World, and I worshipped them from anigh^[205].”

Collating these hints—which Apuleius tells us are all that it is lawful for him to give—with what we know of the origin of the Alexandrian religion and with the scraps of information that have come down to us regarding other ceremonies of a like nature, we may gather from this that the candidate underwent a mock death, being probably made to enact in his own person the passion of Osiris and his shutting-up in a coffin^[206], that he was shown the happy lot of the initiated and the correspondingly miserable fate of the uninitiated in the life after death, that he was subjected to certain “trials,” or proofs of his courage and sincerity, by fire, water, earth, and air, and that he was finally shown in a brilliant light the glorious company of the gods represented either by their images, or by priests arrayed with their best-known attributes. Nothing seems to have been omitted that could impress the imagination of the neophyte, and when the night of initiation was at length over, he was again displayed before the congregation of worshippers clothed in what was known as the Olympian garment (stola Olympiaca) consisting of a dress of byssus or linen embroidered with flowers, over which was cast a rich mantle decorated with figures of fabulous animals, and bearing in his right hand a flaming torch, 63while on his head was a crown of palm-leaves with leaves projecting, as he says, “like rays of light.” In this costume he was placed in a wooden pulpit before the statue of the goddess in the public portion of the temple, and was thus exhibited for the adoration of the crowd, when the ceremony of opening took place^[207]. As the last stage of the secret rite seems to have been the successive imposition upon the initiate of twelve robes, doubtless typifying the twelve signs of the Zodiac, we hardly want the rayed crown, and the explicit words of Apuleius to inform us that in this costume he was intended to represent the material sun (exornatus instar Solis et in vicem simulacri constitutus)^[208]. The sun-god, however, was in the later phases of the Egyptian religion not Osiris but either Ra or Horus^[209], and this last-named god was in the Alexandrian triad equated with the Greek Apollo. It therefore seems likely that the initiate represented here the child of Isis begotten, as has been said, by Osiris after his death and passion, and this corresponds with the statement put into the mouth of Isis and preserved by Proclus: “I am that which has been, is, and will be. My garment none has lifted. The fruit which I bore has become the sun^[210].” It is significant that the later and especially the Christian writers speak of Osiris and not Horus as the son of Isis; but the distinction between father and son in the Egyptian triads was never sharply defined, and there are many signs that Horus, the son of Isis, was looked upon as Osiris re-born^[211].

The initiation strictly so-called was concluded with a banquet 64provided by the initiate in which he celebrated what he was henceforth to regard as his natal day, as his formal entry into the religion was considered by him as a re-birth. Nor was this all. Twelve months after his initiation into the first degree or Mysteries of Isis, Apuleius’ hero is summoned to undergo a further initiation, this time into the mysteries “of the Great God and highest progenitor of the Gods, the unconquered Osiris (magni dei deumque summi parentis, invicti Osiris),” of which we are only told that a further preparation of ten days was necessary and that the aspirant was in addition “enlightened by the nocturnal orgies of the princely god Serapis (insuper etiam Serapis principalis dei nocturnis orgiis illustratus)^[212].” Very shortly after this a third initiation was prescribed to Lucius and was backed up by a dream in which Osiris “the God of the great Gods, or rather the Highest of the Greater Gods and the Greatest of the Highest and the Ruler of the Greatest (deus deum magnorum potior et majorum summus et summorum maximus et maximorum regnator Osiris)” appears to him; but we learn nothing of the nature of this fresh initiation, save that it was preceded like the two others by a ten-days’ fast^[213]. No other text or monument that has yet come to light gives any hint as to the revelations made in these two last degrees or initiations; but it seems likely from the words above quoted that they were concerned with the true nature of Osiris^[214], and that he must have been finally proclaimed to the initiate as the one and only Source of Being. The apparent inconsistency between this and Isis’ own statement given above that she is herself the “highest of godheads ... first of the heavenly ones, one-formed type of 65gods and goddesses” can perhaps be got over by supposing that the Supreme Being was supposed to be at once the father and mother of the inferior gods, an idea of which there are many traces in the Egyptian myths of later Pharaonic times^[215]. Some connection between Osiris in his Egyptian form and the Greek wine-god Bacchus may be implied by the dream which heralded the second initiation showing “one clothed in consecrated linen robes, and bearing thyrsi, ivy and certain things which I may not mention^[216]”; but M. Baillet has found a bronze statue of the Ptolemaic period in which Osiris is represented with grapes and a vine-shoot^[217], and it is therefore unlikely that any identification of the kind formed part of the secrets reserved for initiates^[218].

This, therefore, seems to be all that can be usefully said about the secret part of the worship of the Alexandrian gods. But the founders of the cult must have always borne in mind that while in every religion there are a few devotees who are prepared to go all lengths in theology or enquiry into the nature of their gods, the majority are attracted to it more from a vague desire to enter into amicable relations with the spiritual world than from any other feeling. Even with the Mysteries of Eleusis, it is fairly certain that only a very small proportion of those who attended the ceremonies really grasped the full meaning of what they saw and heard. “Many are the thyrsus-bearers,” quotes Plato in this connection, “but few are the mystes^[219]”; and it is plain that, as the Telesterion at Eleusis could at the outside accommodate three thousand persons, the greater part of the huge crowd in the Iacchos procession must have come only to look on^[220]. But even this more or less 66careless multitude did much to spread the fame of the Eleusinian religion, while it was doubtless from their ranks in the first instance that the true initiates were drawn. With this in view, the Alexandrian priests laid themselves out to cater for the half-convinced crowd as well as for their real devotees, and did so with a success which put the Eleusinian Mysteries entirely in the shade. In this, they were much helped by the practice of the native Egyptian temples in Pharaonic times which has been clearly set forth by M. Moret. Every day in every temple in Egypt there seems to have been a solemn Service of Opening when the statue of the god was taken from its resting-place, purified with incense, dressed, and anointed before the doors were opened, and the public, or perhaps only the king as representing mankind in general, were admitted to adore the god^[221]. This practice was copied with great fidelity in the worship of the Alexandrian gods, and “the morning opening of the temple” (templi matutinas apertiones) became an elaborate ceremony in which the white curtains which hid the statue of Isis from the gaze of the worshippers were drawn back (velis candentibus reductis), and it was displayed blazing with actual robes, gems, and ornaments, like a Madonna in Southern Europe at the present day^[222]. We also learn from Apuleius that prayers to the goddess were offered at the same time, while one of the priests made the circuit of the different altars within the temple, pouring before each of them a libation of Nile water, and “the beginning of the First Hour” was solemnly proclaimed, with chants and shouts which have been compared to the muezzin of the Mahommedans, but which more probably resembled the choral singing of a morning hymn by the assembled congregation^[223]. We know also from a casual allusion in one of Martial’s Epigrams, that the eighth hour was also celebrated by 67a chant of the priests, and it seems likely that this announced the closing of the temple to the profane, and was attended by similar solemnities to those of the opening^[224]. But it is abundantly plain that between these hours the temple remained open for what may be called private worship, and that this took the form of meditation or silent adoration before the statue of Isis. Apuleius’ Lucius repeatedly speaks of the pleasure that he derived even before his initiation from the prolonged contemplation of the goddess’s image^[225], and the Roman poets are full of allusions to the devout who passed much of their time seated before her statue on benches, the place of which is clearly marked out in Isiac temples like that of Pompeii^[226]. That such “meditations” were thought to have in them a saving grace is apparent from a passage in Ovid, where he tells us that he had seen one who had offended “the divinity of the linen-clad Isis” sitting before her altar^[227], and it also seems to have been part of the necessary preparation for those who sought initiation. When we consider that the Eleusinian festivals were celebrated at the most but twice a year, and then only in one part of Greece, we see how greatly the daily services and frequentation of the temples in nearly every large town in the West must have operated in drawing to the Alexandrian worship the devotion of the citizens.

In addition to these, however, there were far more elaborate ceremonies of which we obtain a passing glimpse. At Herculaneum, were found early in last century two mural frescoes portraying scenes in the worship of Isis, and of an Isis who, from the style of the paintings and the place where they were found, can be no other than the Alexandrian goddess. One of these, now in the Museum at Naples, shows a temple surrounded by trees, the porch of which is approached by a staircase and 68is guarded by two sphinxes^[228]. Before the door and at the head of the stairs stands a priest with the shaven crown of the Alexandrian priesthood, holding with both hands an urn breast-high, while behind him are two others, one of whom (probably a woman) is completely clothed, wears long hair, and shakes a sistrum, while the other is naked to the waist and has his head shaved like the central figure. At the foot of the staircase is another priest bearing a sistrum in his left hand and a sort of pointed baton or hiltless sword in his right^[229], with which he seems to be commanding a body of persons of both sexes, who from the shaven crowns of the men are evidently a congregation or college of initiates, and are ranged in two rows upon the steps. In the foreground are three altars, the middle one with a fire burning on it, which an attendant is fanning, while on the right of this is a flute-player seated on the ground, having in front of him a priest with a wand like that before described in either hand, and on the left a man and a woman shaking sistra. The scene evidently represents a religious service of some kind, and this may possibly be, as M. Lafaye suggests, the Adoration of the Sacred Water or water of the Nile, which as Plutarch and Apuleius both hint, was considered the emblem of Osiris^[230]. If so, we may further suppose that the initiates are here singing antiphonally, or in two choirs, the hymn to Serapis, a particular air on the flute being, as we shall see, sacred to that god. The other fresco shows a temple porch like its fellow, although the steps leading up to it are fewer in number and the two sphinxes on either side of the opening are here replaced by two Doric pillars ornamented with garlands. The central figure is a bearded man of black complexion, 69crowned with the lotus and a chaplet of leaves. One hand rests on his hip, and the other is raised in the air, which attitude, perhaps from its likeness to that of the statue known as the Dancing Faun, has given rise to the idea that it is a sacred dance which is here represented^[231]. Behind this figure are two women, one of whom plays a tympanum or tambourine, two children, and a priest or initiate with shaven crown, sistrum in hand, and naked to the waist. In the foreground is the altar seen in the other fresco, with a flame rising from it, and standing to the right of it a priest with a sistrum and another musical instrument in his hands, a flute-player, a child, a kneeling man, a woman clothed in a long garment and bearing, besides the sistrum, a palm-branch, and other worshippers. On the left is a priest with a sistrum, a child bearing in one hand a basket and in the other a small urn, while a woman crowned with leaves, with a sistrum and a dish filled with fruits, kneels at the head of the steps. From the black complexion of the principal figure, M. Lafaye considers that he may represent Osiris himself and that he is here shown at the moment of resurrection, a scene which he considers, not without reason, may have formed the concluding act in one of the sacred dramas or mystery-plays undoubtedly associated with the worship of the god. If so, it is unlikely that it formed part of the initiation into the Mysteries, the particulars of which were carefully concealed from the profane and would hardly have been painted on the walls of temples or dwelling-houses. It seems more probable that the scene in question, whatever be its meaning, was acted in pantomime in, or rather before, the temple at a particular period of the year, that the uninitiated were allowed to be present at it as well as at the Adoration of the Sacred Water, and that these two therefore were familiar and attractive objects to the populace throughout the Roman world.

That the Passion—as it was distinctly called—and Resurrection of Osiris were yearly and openly celebrated by the worshippers of the Alexandrian gods with alternate demonstrations of grief and joy, the classical poets have put beyond 70doubt. The celebration took place in the month of November and began with a ten-day fast on the part of all the faithful which was often spent in the temples. Then followed the representation of the passion of and the seeking for Osiris, and its result, which a Christian writer of the IIIrd century A.D.^[232] thus sums up:

“You behold the swallow^[233] and the cymbal of Isis, and the tomb of your Serapis or Osiris empty, with his limbs scattered about.... Isis bewails, laments and seeks after her lost son^[234], with her Cynocephalus^[235] and her bald-headed priests; and the wretched worshippers of Isis beat their breasts, and imitate the grief of the most unhappy mother. By and by, when the little boy is found, Isis rejoices, and the priests exult. Cynocephalus the discoverer boasts, and they do not cease year by year either to lose what they find, or to find what they lose.”

“These,” he says, “were formerly Egyptian rites, and now are Roman ones”; and it is plain that all the incidents of which he speaks were perfectly familiar to the Roman people. Juvenal^[236] speaks of the bald-headed multitude uttering lamentations and running to and fro, and of their exultant cries when Osiris is found; and the banquets in the temples and great festivals and public games which celebrated the “Finding of Osiris” when the Alexandrian worship was recognized by the state must have made the recurrence of this chief festival of the Alexandrian religion familiar to every one^[237].

How many lesser festivals than these formed part of its public ceremonial we do not know, but they were probably numerous enough. The Roman calendars tell us of a festival of Isis Pharia, probably in her capacity of tutelary goddess of 71Alexandria, and of another of Serapis, both in the month of April, while Plutarch speaks of the Birth of Horus celebrated, as was natural with a sun-god, after the vernal equinox, when nature awakens and the sun begins to show forth his power. But there was another spring festival which took place on the 5th of March^[238] to mark the reopening of navigation and commerce after the departure of winter, in which the faithful went in procession to the sea (or probably in its absence to the nearest water), and there set afloat a new ship filled with offerings which was known as the vessel of Isis. Apuleius has left us a description of this festival at once so lively and so imbued with the spirit of the devout Isiacist, that it may be pardonable to quote from it at some length. The procession, which in the case he is describing sets forth at dawn from the gates of Cenchreae the eastern port of Corinth, is heralded by a carnival in which burlesque representations of magistrates, gladiators, hunters, and fishermen jostle with caricatures of ancient Greek heroes and demigods like Bellerophon and Ganymede. After this had dispersed, “the procession proper of the Saviour Goddess,” he says, set itself in motion, and may be described in his own words^[239]:

“Women shining in white garments displayed their joy by divers gestures, and crowned with spring blossoms strewed from their laps flowers upon the road over which marched the holy throng. Others, with glittering mirrors held behind them, showed to the advancing Goddess their ready service. Others, who bore ivory combs, by the motion of their arms and the twining of their fingers represented the combing of her royal hair, while yet others sprinkled the ways with drops of sweet-smelling balsam and other unguents. A great crowd also of both sexes followed with lamps, torches, candles and other kinds of lights making propitious with light the source of the heavenly stars. Thereafter came gentle harmonies, and reeds and flutes sounded with sweetest modulations. A graceful choir of chosen youths followed, shining in snowy dresses of ceremony and singing a beautiful hymn which by grace of the Muses a skilful poet had set to music, although its theme recalled the prayers of our forefathers. 72Then came flute-players consecrated to the great Serapis, who on the slanted reed held under the right ear, repeated the air usual in the temple of the God, in order that everyone might be warned to make room for the passage of the holy things. Then pressed on the multitude of those who had been initiated into the divine mysteries, both men and women of every rank and age, shining in the pure whiteness of their linen robes, the women with hair moist with perfume and covered with a transparent veil, the men with closely shaven hair and glistening heads. Earthly stars of the great religion were these, who made a shrill tinkling with brazen silver or even gold sistra. Then came the priests of the holy things, those distinguished men who, tightly swathed in white linen from the breast-girdle to the feet, displayed to view the noble emblems of the most mighty God. The first held forth a lamp shining with clear light, not exactly resembling those which give light to nocturnal banquets, but in the form of a golden boat and emitting a broader flame through its central opening. The second, clothed in the same way as the first, carried in his two hands the little altars, i.e. the auxilia to which the helping foresight of the high Goddess has given a peculiar name. The third bore a palm-tree with tiny golden leaves, and likewise the caduceus of Mercury. The fourth exhibited the emblem of Equity, a left hand represented with outstretched palm, which from its inborn disinclination to work, and as being endowed with neither skill nor expertness, seems better suited to typify Equity than the right. He also bore a golden vase in the rounded shape of a female breast, from which he poured libations of milk. The fifth carried a winnowing-fan composed of golden wires, and yet another an amphora.

“Without interval, the Gods who have deigned to walk with the feet of men go forward. Here—dread sight!—is he who is the messenger between the supernal and the infernal deities. Upright, of a complexion black in some parts, golden in others, Anubis raises on high his dog’s head, bearing in his left hand the caduceus, and shaking in his right the budding palm-branch^[240]. Close upon his footsteps, follows a cow, held on high in an erect posture—the cow, fertile image of the Goddess who brings forth all things—which one of the blessed ministry with pantomimic steps bears seated on his shoulders. The chest containing the mysteries was carried by 73another, thus wholly concealing the hidden things of the sublime religion^[241]. Yet another bore within his happy bosom the revered likeness of the Supreme Divinity, resembling neither a domestic animal, nor bird, nor wild beast, nor even man himself; but yet to be revered in the highest degree alike for its skilful invention, and for its very novelty, and also as that unspeakable evidence of the religion which should be veiled in complete silence. As to its outward form, it was fashioned in glittering gold—an urn hollowed out with perfected art with a round base and carved externally with the marvellous images of the Egyptians. Its mouth was not much raised and jutted forth in an extended spout with a wide stream; while on the opposite side was attached the handle bent far out with a wide sweep, on which sate an asp in wreathed folds uplifting the swollen stripes of his scaly neck.”

This description will leave little doubt on the mind of the reader as to the supreme importance in the religion of the urn which is being held up for the adoration of the faithful in the fresco from Herculaneum before described; and this is borne out by a bas-relief in the Vatican in which a similar urn to that described by Apuleius is represented as being carried in procession^[242]. “They say,” says Hippolytus speaking of the worshippers of Isis, “that Osiris is water,” and Celsus, according to Origen, confirms him in this^[243]. According to this last, Isis represented the earth, and the doctrine may therefore be an allegory representing the fertilization of the land by the Nile. It is more likely, however, that it is to be attributed to one of the older cosmogonies current in Egypt, wherein water, personified by the god Nu, is the origin of everything^[244]. The main 74point to note for our present purpose is that an urn or vase containing liquid, was, in the public ceremonies of the Alexandrian religion, the recognized symbol of the Supreme Being.

Apuleius next describes the procession as having reached the seashore where the images of the gods were arranged in order^[245]:

“Then the Chief Priest, pouring forth with chaste mouth the most solemn prayers, consecrated and dedicated to the goddess, after having thoroughly purified it with a lighted torch, an egg, and some sulphur, a ship made with the highest art and painted all over with the wonderful pictures of the Egyptians. The shining sail of this blessed bark had the words of a prayer woven in it; and these words reiterated the petition that the navigation then commencing might be prosperous. And now the mast was stepped, a round piece of pine, lofty and smooth, and conspicuous from the handsome appearance of its truck, and the poop with its twisted goose-neck shone covered with gold-leaf, while the whole hulk was gay with polished citron wood. Then all the people, both the religious and the profane, heaped emulously together winnowing-fans laden with spices and such like offerings, and poured upon them crumbled cakes made with milk, until the ship, filled with magnificent gifts offered in fulfilment of vows, was loosed from its moorings and put to sea with a gentle breeze that seemed to spring up on purpose. After her course became indistinct to us by reason of the distance that she was from our eyes, the bearers of the holy things again took up each his own load, and joyfully returned to the fane in the same solemn procession as before. But when we arrived at the temple, the Chief Priest and the bearers of the divine effigies, and those who have been already initiated into the ever to be revered secrets, entering into the chamber of the Goddess put away the breathing images with due ceremony. Then one of them, whom men call the Scribe, standing before the doors and having called together as if for a discourse the company of the Pastophori^[246]—which is the name of this sacrosanct college—forthwith recited from a lofty pulpit prayers written in a book for the Great Prince, the Senate, the Equestrian Order, and the whole Roman people, their sailors and 75ships, and all who are under the sway of our native land, and then closed the address according to the Greek rite thus: ‘Let the people depart^[247].’ Which announcement was followed by a shout of the people showing that it was favourably received by all. Then the multitude, rejoicing exceedingly and bearing olive-branches, laurel-twigs, and chaplets, after having kissed the feet of a statue of the goddess fashioned in silver which stood on steps [within the porch?], departed to their own homes.”

What most strikes one in this account by an eye-witness, which must have been written about the year 170 A.D., is the entirely modern tone of it all. In the scene that passes under Lucius’ eyes, there is hardly anything that might not be seen at an Italian festa at the present day. The joyous crowd, respectful rather than devout, and not above introducing a comic or rather a burlesque element into the day’s rejoicing, the images and sacred vessels carried solemnly along, the crowd of tonsured priests, and the chants and hymns sung in chorus, the return to the temple, with its prayers for Church and State, and its dismissal of the people—all these are paralleled every day in countries where the Catholic Church is still dominant. Not less modern, too, is the way in which Lucius alludes to the faith of which all these things illustrate the power. For him, there is no other god than Isis—“thou who art all^[248],” as one of her votaries calls her on his tombstone, in whom “single in essence, though with many names^[249],” all other gods are contained. Hence, he can think of no other religion than her worship. It is always with him “the holy” or “the sublime religion,” and the goddess is she whom the whole earth adores. It is she in whom one can trust not only for happiness beyond the tomb, but for present help in all the troubles of this life, and to devote oneself to her service, to thoroughly learn, to understand her nature, is the proudest lot which can befall man while upon earth. Hence all her initiates were “earthly stars,” her priests were all happy or blessed in that they were allowed to be near 76and even to carry and handle the divine images, and the religion was a real bond which united people of all ranks and ages. We feel that we have here got a very long way from the time when the power of each god was supposed to be limited to the small space surrounding his sanctuary.

That this change had been brought about by the work of the Isiac priesthood, there can be little doubt. Between the foundation of the Alexandrian religion by Ptolemy and the date at which Apuleius wrote, a space of five centuries elapsed, and this must have seen many changes in the constitution of what may be called the Isiac Church. The Greeks always set their faces against anything like a priestly caste set apart from the rest of the community, and the priests of the Hellenic gods were for the most part elected, like modern mayors of towns, for a short term only, after which they fell back into the ranks of the laity with as little difficulty as do municipal officers at the present day. The Eleusinian Mysteries were indeed committed to certain families in whom their priesthood was hereditary; but no professional barriers existed between these families and the rest of the citizens; and we find Callias, the “torch-bearer” and one of the highest officials at the Mysteries, not only fighting in the ranks at Marathon, but distinguishing himself by his “cruelty and injustice” in retaining an unfair share of the plunder for himself^[250]. The Eumolpidae and Lycomidae of Eleusis, also, were probably maintained not by any contribution from the state, but by the revenues of the temple lands and by the fee of a few obols levied from each initiate. But the Alexandrian Church in Egypt must from the first have been endowed and probably established as well. To judge from the analogous case of the dynastic cult or worship of the sovereign, which Ptolemy Soter set up, the “sublime religion” was in its native Egypt maintained by a tax on the revenues of those wakf or temple lands held in mortmain with which the native gods of Egypt were so richly provided from the earliest times. When the Alexandrian religion became a missionary faith and established itself in Athens and other parts of the Hellenic world, it no doubt depended in the 77first instance on the voluntary contributions of the associations of Sarapiasts or Isiaci founded for its maintenance. But we may be sure that politic princes like the first three Ptolemies, who were besides the richest and most opulent of all the Successors of Alexander, did not let these outposts of their empire languish for lack of funds, and we may guess that the subscriptions of their members were supplemented in case of need by large donations from the King of Egypt or from those who wished to stand well with him. When the faith passed into Western Europe and into territories directly under Roman sway, it had already attained such fame that a large entrance-fee could be demanded from the initiates, and Apuleius tells us more than once that the amount of this was in every case fixed by a special revelation of the goddess, and was no doubt only limited by the length of the aspirant’s purse and the strength of his vocation^[251]. Like other Greek priests of the time, also, the ministers of the Alexandrian religion found a way of adding to their income by the practice of divination or foretelling the future, and the oracle of Serapis at Alexandria soon became as celebrated in the Hellenistic world as that of Delphi. There were probably more ways than one of consulting this; but the one which seems to have been specially its own, and which afterwards spread from Egypt into all the temples of the faith in other countries, was by the practice of incubatio which meant sleeping either personally or by deputy in the precinct of the god until the consultant had a dream in which the god’s answer was declared. Such a practice seems to date from the dream sent to Ptolemy Soter at the foundation of the religion, and doubtless formed a great source of revenue to its priesthood^[252]. The highest personages in the Roman Empire deigned to resort to it, and Vespasian was vouchsafed a divine vision in the temple of Serapis when he consulted the god about “the affairs 78of the Empire^[253].” Not unconnected with this were the miraculous cures with which Serapis, originally perhaps by confusion with Asklepios the Greek god of healing^[254], was credited. The sick man was given a room in the temple precincts, where he doubtless lived the regular and orderly life of a modern hospital, and before long dreamed of a remedy for the malady on which his thoughts were concentrated. As the mind sometimes influences the body, and a belief in the healing power of the medicine is often of more importance than its nature, he very often recovered, and was no doubt expected to be generous in his offerings to the god who had intervened in his cure. Nor were worse means of raising money unknown to the Alexandrian priests, unless they have been greatly belied. They are said to have acted as panders and procurers for the rich, and it was the seduction of a noble Roman lady by a lover who assumed the garb of the god Anubis which led to their expulsion from the Pomoerium under Tiberius^[255]. Astrology, too, which depended entirely on mathematical calculations and tables, was peculiarly an Alexandrian art, and the same Manetho who had been one of the persons consulted at the founding of the Alexandrian religion was said to have taught its principles to the Greeks. Whether this be so or not, it is certain that in Ovid’s time the Alexandrian priests used to beg in the streets of Rome after the fashion of the Buddhist monks from whom they may have indirectly borrowed the practice, and that it was thought “unlucky” to reject their importunities^[256].