ns with life are widest and most profound. As such they
appear in the Eleusinia; and in all mythology they furnish the only
possible key for the interpretation of its mystic symbolism, its
hieroglyphic records, and its ill-defined traditions.

Accordingly we find that all mythology naturally and inevitably
flows about these centres into two distinct developments, which are
indicated,--

1. In Nature; inasmuch as they are first made manifest through symbols
which point to the two great forces, the _active_ and the _passive_,
which are concerned in all natural processes (_sol et terra subjacens
soli_); and,

2. In the primitive belief among all nations, that men are the offspring
of the earth and the heavens,--and in the worship equally prevalent of
the sun, the personal Presence of the heavens, as Saviour Lord, and of
the earth as sorrowing Lady and Mother.

Why the earth, in this primitive symbolism and worship, was represented
as the Sorrowing One, and the sun as Saviour, is evident at a glance.
It was the bosom of the earth which was shaken with storm and rent with
earthquake. She was the Mother, and hers was the travail of all birth;
in sorrow she forever gathered to herself her Fate-conquered children;
her sorrowful countenance she veiled in thick mists, and, year after
year, shrouded herself in wintry desolation: while he was the Eternal
Father, the Revealer of all things, he drove away the darkness, and in
his presence the mist became an invisible exhalation; and, as out of
darkness and death, he called into birth the flowers and the numberless
forests,--even as he himself was every morning born anew out of
darkness,--so he called the children of the earth to a glorious rising
in his light. Everything of the earth was inert, weighing heavily upon
the sense and the heart, only waiting its transfiguration and exaltation
through his power, until it should rise into the heavens; which was the
type of his translation to himself of his grief-oppressed children.

Under these symbols our Lord and Lady have been worshipped by an
overwhelming majority of the human race. They swayed the ancient world,
from the Indians by the Ganges, and the Tartar tribes, to the Britons
and Laplanders of Northwestern Europe,--having their representatives in
every system of faith,--in the Hindu _Isi and Isana_, the Egyptian _Isis
and Osiris_, the Assyrian _Venus and Adonis_, the _Demeter and Dionysus_
of Greece, the Roman _Ceres and Bacc