he Gnostic,[150:2] 'that thou mayst be what I
am and I what thou art.' 'I in thee, and thou in me!' is the ecstatic
cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been
'Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman'.[150:3]

In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a
mediator between the seeker after God and his goal. Mithras himself saw
a Mesites, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary
mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge
which he reveals to the outsider. The circumstances out of which these
systems grew have left their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual,
the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of
worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the
Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in
the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis,
when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century B. C. established their own
temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must
be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each
case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present
some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation
that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher
explanation known only to the great master in Jerusalem, in Egypt, in
Babylon, or perhaps in some unexplored and ever-receding region of the
east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a
characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions.

Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or
lessons revealed by a 'father' to a 'son', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes
to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us. It was an ancient
formula, a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, where the
young priest became regularly the 'son' of the old priest. It is a form
that we find in Greece itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe
says of her cosmological doctrines,

'It is not my word but my Mother's word'.[152:1]

It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man to his disciple.
In one fine liturgy Thoth wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit, till
Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to union with God which he
himself has trodden before. At the end of the Mithras liturgy the
devotee who has passed through the mystic or