Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/161

 was the nation that endured. Naturally, this was unsatisfying to the uneducated ; their Rome was the abridgment of every superstition, their Pantheon an abattoir of the Gods who presided over death and whose worship was gore.

Added to this had come the worship of Isis, the secrets of Mithra, of which the chief note was one of mysticism. There was something terrifying and yet alluring about the abluent functions, the initiations, the secrets that it was death to divulge. Now, the rites that Antonine introduced were entirely blatant, Semitic, Syrian. They contained, as far as we can judge, nothing specially mysterious, either in the way of initiation or progression, little which could even attract the curiosity of the devout. All that Elagabal could appeal to was the public curiosity ; his worship was, in fact, designed to appeal to such and nothing more, at the outset ; even with such an end in view it might have become popular had it not been that Antonine made this all-embracing deity too easy of access, in consequence of which he became too cheap. The Emperor seems to have recognised this early, and to have evolved a scheme for uniting the already popular mysteries of all other Gods with his own ; to which resolve we may attribute the stories of his initiation into the priesthood of Cybele and the rest ; he thought that it would enhance his God's attractiveness and assure his popularity in the eyes of the mob.