the soul was freed from the tyranny of the body and of
suffering, {30} and lost itself in raptures. They led to ecstasy either by
means of nervous tension resulting from continued maceration and fervent
contemplation or by more material means like the stimulation of vertiginous
dances and dizzy music, or even by the absorption of fermented liquors
after a long abstinence,[11] as in the case of the priests of the Great
Mother. In mysticism it is easy to descend from the sublime to the vile.

Even the gods, with whom the believers thought they were uniting themselves
in their mystic outbursts, were more human and sometimes more sensual than
those of the Occident. The latter had that quietude of soul in which the
philosophic morality of the Greeks saw a privilege of the sage; in the
serenity of Olympus they enjoyed perpetual youth; they were Immortals. The
divinities of the Orient, on the contrary, suffered and died, but only to
revive again.[12] Osiris, Attis and Adonis were mourned like mortals by
wife or mistress, Isis, Cybele or Astarte. With them the mystics moaned for
their deceased god and later, after he had revived, celebrated with
exultation his birth to a new life. Or else they joined in the passion of
Mithra, condemned to create the world in suffering. This common grief and
joy were often expressed with savage violence, by bloody mutilations, long
wails of despair, and extravagant acclamations. The manifestations of the
extreme fanaticism of those barbarian races that had not been touched by
Greek skepticism and the very ardor of their faith inflamed the souls of
the multitudes attracted by the exotic gods.

The Oriental religions touched every chord of sensibility and satisfied the
thirst for religious emotion that the austere Roman creed had been unable
to quench. {31} But at the same time they satisfied the intellect more
fully, and this is my second point.

In very early times Greece--later imitated by Rome--became resolutely
rationalistic: her greatest originality lies here. Her philosophy was
purely laical; thought was unrestrained by any sacred tradition; it even
pretended to pass judgment upon these traditions and condemned or approved
of them. Being sometimes hostile, sometimes indifferent and some times
conciliatory, it always remained independent of faith. But while Greece
thus freed herself from the fetters of a superannuated mythology, and
openly and boldly constructed those systems of metaphysics