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For though the conjunction of the two crescent-shaped and feminine lights of heaven, was of old, like the combination of the symbol of the Sun as representing the Male Principle with that ever feminine symbol the Crescent, held to signify Increase and Life, we are dealing with what was admittedly a Mithraic symbol.

+1113+. Cults of Mithra and Isis. The Mithraic communities were wholly voluntary associations, without distinctions of birth or social position, were recognized by the State, but received no pecuniary aid from it and had no official connection with it.

It does not appear that there was any general organization of the Mithraic associations; each of these was local, probably small, had its own set of officers, and managed its own affairs. It was thus free from some of the perils that beset Christianity.

That Vergil had Isaiah, chapter II, before his eyes when he wrote the fourth Eclogue is of course out of the question; there is not a single close parallel of the kind that Vergil usually permits himself to borrow from his sources; we cannot even be sure that he had seen any of the Sibylline oracles, now found in the third book of the collection, which contains so strange a syncretism of Mithraic, Greek, and Jewish conceptions, but we can no longer doubt that he was in a general way well informed and quite thoroughly permeated with such mystical and apocalyptic sentiments as every Gadarene and any Greek from the Orient might well know.

We can trace the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore, the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the Caprese ravines.

Such representations certainly suggest that the bull, whose sacrifice appears to have formed a leading feature in the Mithraic ritual, was conceived, in one at least of its aspects, as an incarnation of the corn-spirit.

It is to the period which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque.

Nature of deities examined. Attis. Mithra. The Messianic Feast. Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie. Difference between the two initiations. Link between Phrygian, Mithraic, and Christian, Mysteries to be found in their higher, esoteric, teaching. Women not admitted to Mithraic initiation. Possible survival in Grail text. Joint diffusion through the Roman Empire. Cumont's evidence.

In referring to the religion of this people, and to the great antiquity of the worship of the Virgin and Child, Higgins remarks: "Amongst the Gauls, more than a hundred years before the Christian era, in the district of Chartres, a festival was celebrated in honor of the Virgin," and in the year 1747, a mithraic monument was found "on which is exhibited a female nursing an infant the Goddess of the year nursing the God day."

The Chart appended to Cumont's Monuments de Mithra shows Mithraic remains in precisely the locality where we have reason to believe certain of the Gawain and Perceval stories to have originated. As to the date of origin, that, of course, is closely connected with the problem of authorship; if we can, with any possibility, identify the author we can approximately fix the date.