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36 i. e. "But Pindar, speaking of the Eleusinian Mysteries, says, blessed is he who, on seeing those common concerns under the earth, knows both the end of life and the given empire of Jupiter." The other of these is from Proclus in his commentary on Plato’s Politics, p. 372, who, speaking concerning the sacerdotal and symbolical mythology, observes, that from this mythology Plato himself establishes many of his own peculiar dogmata, "since in the Phædo he venerates, with a becoming silence, the assertion delivered in the arcane discourses, that men are placed in body as in a certain prison, secured by a guard, and testifies, according to the mystic ceremonies, the different allotments of pure and impure souls in Hades, their habits, and the triple path arising from their essences; and this according to paternal and sacred institutions; all which are full of a symbolical theory, and of the poetical descriptions concerning the ascent and descent of souls, of dionysiacal signs, the punishments of the Titans, the trivia and wanderings in Hades, and every thing of a similar kind."

Having premised thus much, I now proceed to prove that the shews of the lesser mysteries were designed by the ancient theologists, their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the impure soul invested with a terrene body, and merged in a material nature: or, in other words, to signify that such a soul in the present life might be said to die, as far as it is possible for soul to die; and that on the dissolution of the present body, while in a state of impurity, it would experience a death still more durable and profound. That the soul, indeed, till purified by philosophy, suffers death through its union with body, was obvious to the philologist Macrobius, who, not penetrating the secret depth of the antients, concluded from hence that they signified nothing more than the present body,