"So they do," he answers quite
frankly, "but these cheat themselves with waters that are widowed. For
washing is the channel through which they are initiated into some sacred
rites of some notorious Isis or Mithra; and the Gods themselves they
honour by washings.... At the Apollinarian and Eleusinian games they
are baptised; and they presume that the effect of their doing that is
the regeneration and the remission of the penalties due to their
perjuries. Which fact, being acknowledged, we recognise here also the
zeal of the devil rivalling the things of God, while we find him too
practising baptism in his subjects."[177]

To solve the difficulty of these identities we must study the Mythic
Christ, the Christ of the solar myths or legends, these myths being the
pictorial forms in which certain profound truths were given to the
world.

Now a "myth" is by no means what most people imagine it to be--a mere
fanciful story erected on a basis of fact, or even altogether apart from
fact. A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a
story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances
that cast the shadows. As above so below; and _first_ above and _then_
below. There are certain great principles according to which our system
is built; there are certain laws by which these principles are worked
out in detail; there are certain Beings who embody the principles and
whose activities are the laws; there are hosts of inferior beings who
act as vehicles for these activities, as agents, as instruments; there
are the Egos of men intermingled with all these, performing their share
of the great kosmic drama. These multifarious workers in the invisible
worlds cast their shadows on physical matter, and these shadows are
"things"--the bodies, the objects, that make up the physical universe.
These shadows give but a poor idea of the objects that cast them, just
as what we call shadows down here give but a poor idea of the objects
that cast them; they are mere outlines, with blank darkness in lieu of
details, and have only length and breadth, no depth.

History is an account, very imperfect and often distorted, of the dance
of these shadows in the shadow-world of physical matter. Anyone who has
seen a clever Shadow-Play, and has compared what goes on behind the
screen on which the shadows are cast with the movements of the shadows
on the screen, may have a vivid idea of the illusory nature of the
shadow-act