took under its protection other foreign divinities from Anatolia and
assimilated them to Cybele and Attis, who thereafter bore the symbols of
several deities together. Cappadocian, Jewish, Persian and even Christian
influences modified the old rites of Pessinus and filled them with ideas of
spiritual purification and {198} eternal redemption by the bloody baptism
of the taurobolium. But the priests did not succeed in eliminating the
basis of coarse naturism which ancient barbaric tradition had imposed upon
them.

Beginning with the second century before our era, the mysteries of Isis and
Serapis spread over Italy with the Alexandrian culture whose religious
expression they were, and in spite of all persecution established
themselves at Rome where Caligula gave them the freedom of the city. They
did not bring with them a very advanced theological system, because Egypt
never produced anything but a chaotic aggregate of disparate doctrines, nor
a very elevated ethics, because the level of its morality--that of the
Alexandrian Greeks--rose but slowly from a low stage. But they made Italy,
and later the other Latin provinces, familiar with an ancient ritual of
incomparable charm that aroused widely different feelings with its splendid
processions and liturgic dramas. They also gave their votaries positive
assurance of a blissful immortality after death, when they would be united
with Serapis and, participating body and soul in his divinity, would live
in eternal contemplation of the gods.

At a somewhat later period arrived the numerous and varied Baals of Syria.
The great economic movement starting at the beginning of our era which
produced the colonization of the Latin world by Syrian slaves and
merchants, not only modified the material civilization of Europe, but also
its conceptions and beliefs. The Semitic cults entered into successful
competition with those of Asia Minor and Egypt. They may not have had so
stirring a liturgy, nor have been so thoroughly absorbed in preoccupation
with a future {199} life, although they taught an original eschatology, but
they did have an infinitely higher idea of divinity. The Chaldean
astrology, of which the Syrian priests were enthusiastic disciples, had
furnished them with the elements of a scientific theology. It had led them
to the notion of a God residing far from the earth above the zone of the
stars, a God almighty, universal and eternal. Everything on earth was
determined by th