necessity of a hidden
side in all religions. When from theory we turn to facts, we naturally
ask: Has this hidden side existed in the past, forming a part of the
religions of the world? The answer must be an immediate and unhesitating
affirmative; every great religion has claimed to possess a hidden
teaching, and has declared that it is the repository of theoretical
mystic, and further of practical mystic, or occult, knowledge. The
mystic explanation of popular teaching was public, and expounded the
latter as an allegory, giving to crude and irrational statements and
stories a meaning which the intellect could accept. Behind this
theoretical mysticism, as it was behind the popular, there existed
further the practical mysticism, a hidden spiritual teaching, which was
only imparted under definite conditions, conditions known and published,
that must be fulfilled by every candidate. S. Clement of Alexandria
mentions this division of the Mysteries. After purification, he says,
"are the Minor Mysteries, which have some foundation of instruction and
of preliminary preparation for what is to come after; and the Great
Mysteries, in which nothing remains to be learned of the universe, but
only to contemplate and comprehend nature and things."[9]

This position cannot be controverted as regards the ancient religions.
The Mysteries of Egypt were the glory of that ancient land, and the
noblest sons of Greece, such as Plato, went to Sais and to Thebes to be
initiated by Egyptian Teachers of Wisdom. The Mithraic Mysteries of the
Persians, the Orphic and Bacchic Mysteries and the later Eleusinian
semi-Mysteries of the Greeks, the Mysteries of Samothrace, Scythia,
Chaldea, are familiar in name, at least, as household words. Even in the
extremely diluted form of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their value is most
highly praised by the most eminent men of Greece, as Pindar, Sophocles,
Isocrates, Plutarch, and Plato. Especially were they regarded as useful
with regard to _post-mortem_ existence, as the Initiated learned that
which ensured his future happiness. Sopater further alleged that
Initiation established a kinship of the soul with the divine Nature, and
in the exoteric Hymn to Demeter covert references are made to the holy
child, Iacchus, and to his death and resurrection, as dealt with in the
Mysteries.[10]

From Iamblichus, the great theurgist of the third and fourth centuries
A.D., much may be learned as to the object of the Mysterie