religious habits of the Greeks, the
doctrinal contents of the Alexandrian mysteries remained purely Egyptian.
The old belief that immortality could be secured by means of an
identification of the deceased with Osiris or Serapis never died out.

Perhaps in no other people did the epigram of Fustel de Coulanges find so
complete a verification as in the Egyptians: "Death was the first mystery;
it started man on the road to the other mysteries."[80] Nowhere else was
life so completely dominated by preoccupation with life after death;
nowhere else was such minute and complicated care taken to secure and
perpetuate another existence for the deceased. The funeral literature, of
which we have found a very great number of documents, had acquired a
development equaled by no other, and the architecture of no other nation
can exhibit tombs comparable with the pyramids or the rock-built sepulchers
of Thebes.

This constant endeavor to secure an after-existence for one's self and
relatives manifested itself in various ways, but it finally assumed a
concrete form in the worship of Osiris. The fate of Osiris, the god who
died and returned to life, became the prototype of the {100} fate of every
human being that observed the funeral rites. "As truly as Osiris lives,"
says an Egyptian text, "he also shall live; as truly as Osiris is not dead,
shall he not die; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated, shall he not be
annihilated."[81]

If, then, the deceased had piously served Osiris-Serapis, he was
assimilated to that god, and shared his immortality in the underworld,
where the judge of the dead held forth. He lived not as a tenuous shade or
as a subtle spirit, but in full possession of his body as well as of his
soul. That was the Egyptian doctrine, and that certainly was also the
doctrine of the Greco-Latin mysteries.[82]

Through the initiation the mystic was born again, but to a superhuman life,
and became the equal of the immortals.[83] In his ecstasy he imagined that
he was crossing the threshold of death and contemplating the gods of heaven
and hell face to face.[84] If he had accurately followed the prescriptions
imposed upon him by Isis and Serapis through their priests, those gods
prolonged his life after his decease beyond the duration assigned to it by
destiny, and he participated eternally in their beatitude and offered them
his homage in their realm.[85] The "unspeakable pleasure" he felt when
contemplating the sacred imag