iving a definition of what these Mysteries were, says,
"Each of the pagan gods had (besides the public and open) a secret worship
paid unto him, to which none were admitted but those who had been selected
by preparatory ceremonies, called initiation. This secret worship was
termed the Mysteries." I shall now endeavor briefly to trace the
connection between these Mysteries and the institution of Freemasonry; and
to do so, it will be necessary to enter upon some details of the
constitution of those mystic assemblies.

Almost every country of the ancient world had its peculiar Mysteries,
dedicated to the occult worship of some especial and favorite god, and to
the inculcation of a secret doctrine, very different from that which was
taught in the public ceremonial of devotion. Thus in Persia the Mysteries
were dedicated to Mithras, or the Sun; in Egypt, to Isis and Osiris; in
Greece, to Demeter; in Samothracia, to the gods Cabiri, the Mighty Ones;
in Syria, to Dionysus; while in the more northern nations of Europe, such
as Gaul and Britain, the initiations were dedicated to their peculiar
deities, and were celebrated under the general name of the Druidical
rites. But no matter where or how instituted, whether ostensibly in honor
of the effeminate Adonis, the favorite of Venus, or of the implacable
Odin, the Scandinavian god of war and carnage; whether dedicated to
Demeter, the type of the earth, or to Mithras, the symbol of all that
fructifies that earth,--the great object and design of the secret
instruction were identical in all places, and the Mysteries constituted a
school of religion in which the errors and absurdities of polytheism were
revealed to the initiated. The candidate was taught that the multitudinous
deities of the popular theology were but hidden symbols of the various
attributes of the supreme god,--a spirit invisible and indivisible,--and
that the soul, as an emanation from his essence, could "never see
corruption," but must, after the death of the body, be raised to an
eternal life.[10]

That this was the doctrine and the object of the Mysteries is evident from
the concurrent testimony both of those ancient writers who flourished
contemporaneously with the practice of them, and of those modern scholars
who have devoted themselves to their investigation.

Thus Isocrates, speaking of them in his Panegyric, says, "Those who have
been initiated in the Mysteries of Ceres entertain better hopes both as to
th