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Significance of evidence. Vegetation cults as vehicle of high spiritual teaching. Exoteric and Esoteric parallels with the Grail tradition. Process of evolution sketched. Bleheris. Perlesvaus. Borron and the Mystery tradition. Christian Legendary, and Folk-tale, secondary, not primary, features. Mithra and Attis Problem of close connection of cults. Their apparent divergence.
Thus addressed, Brahma bowed his head unto the illustrious Hari, the god of the gods and received from him that foremost of all cults with all its mysteries and its abstract of details, together with the Aranyakas, viz., that cult, which sprang from the mouth of Narayana.
Sargon goes so far in this homage as to pose as the reorganizer of the cults of Sippar, Nippur, Borsippa, and Babylon, and of restoring the income to temples in other places. But there was another side to this homage that must not be overlooked. By sacrificing in the Babylonian temples, the Assyrian rulers indicated their political control over the south.
The programme of the great Popes, from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII, must appear a tissue of absurdities, of preposterous ambitions and indefensible actions, unless it is studied in relation to a theology as far remote from primitive Christianity as from the cults and philosophies of classical antiquity.
But even here we shall find it worth while to trace broadly the history of faith and mental healing. Those cults which are either founded upon faith healing or involve it have a long ancestry. George Barton Cutten's very suggestive book makes that clear enough and supplies an informing mass of detail.
But closer analysis does not confirm the importance of this difference. The initiates of the other cults believed that their Lords were historic persons, just as Christians believed that Jesus was. They had, indeed, lived a long time ago, but this was no disadvantage: any one who reads Tatian's Oratio ad Graecos can see how antiquity, not recentness, was regarded as desirable.
Vesta, with her simple cult and her virgin priestesses, was almost the only deity who was not either forgotten or metamorphosed in one way or another under the influence of Greek literature and mythology; Vesta was too well recognised as a symbol of the State's vitality to be subject to neglect like other and less significant cults.
The basis of that institution, as well as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question.
He invites comparison not only with the Saviour of the Gospels, but also with figures that appear in the myths of the mystery cults: with Horos, the son of Isis, with Hermes the Thrice-Great, with the "Eagle" or "Father" whose title represented the highest grade of the Mithriaca.
In the period which corresponds to the later kingdom, and roughly to the sixth century before Christ, and which we have called "Servian" for convenience, we have watched a primitive pastoral community, isolated from the world's life, turning into a small city-state with political interests, the beginnings of trade and handicraft, and various rival social classes; and we have seen how along with the coming of these outside interests there came various new cults connected with them, most of them implying entirely new deities, and only one or two of them new sides of old deities.
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