was initiated to Isis and became 'her image'. After much fasting,
clad in holy garments and led by the High Priest, he crossed the
threshold of Death and passed through all the Elements. The Sun shone
upon him at midnight, and he saw the Gods of Heaven and of Hades. In the
morning he was clad in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in
front of the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as a God. He had
been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that
Sun-God to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it.

There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and
visions of god vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers. St.
Paul, we may remember, knew personally a man who had actually been
snatched up into the Third Heaven, and another who was similarly rapt
into Paradise, where he heard unspeakable words;[149:1] whether in the
body or not, the apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to
Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the flesh. The
philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells us, was united with God in
trance four times in five years.[149:2]

We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity of early Greek
religion. Yet, apart always from Plotinus, who is singularly aloof, most
of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous
influences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults. The union of
man with God came regularly through _Ekstasis_--the soul must get clear
of its body--and _Enthousiasmos_--the God must enter and dwell inside
the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized
and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most
primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very
low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the
primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood
of their God-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these
rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some
substitute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in
a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kouretes
with their Zeus Koures[150:1] and those strange hierophants of the
'Men's House' whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thera, would
have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the
fall of Hellenism. 'Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her
bridegroom,' says Markos t