Page:The Pamphleteer (Volume 8).djvu/66

62 rollest the heavens round the steady poles, dost illuminate the sun, govern the world, and tread on the dark realms of Tartarus. The Stars move responsive to thy command, the gods rejoice in thy divinity, the hours and seasons return by thy appointment, and the elements reverence thy decree." For all this easily follows, if we consider it as addressed to the fontal deity of nature, subsisting in the Demiurgus, and which is the exemplar of that nature which flourishes in the lunar orb, and throughout the material world, and from which the deity itself of the moon originally proceeds. Hence, as this fountain immediately depends on the vivific goddess Rhea, the reason is obvious, why it was formerly worshipped as the mother of the gods: and as all the mundane are contained in the super-mundane gods, the other appellations are to be considered as names of the several mundane divinities produced by this fountain, and in whose essence they are likewise contained.

But to proceed with our inquiry, I shall, in the next place, prove that the different purifications exhibited in these rites, in conjunction with initiation and inspection, were symbols of the gradation of virtues requisite to the reascent of the soul. And the first part, indeed, of this proposition respecting the purifications, immediately follows from the testimony of Plato in the passage already adduced, in which he asserts, that the ultimate design of the mysteries was to lead us back to the principles from which we originally fell. For if the mysteries were symbolical, as is universally acknowledged, this must likewise be true of the purifications as a part of the mysteries; and as inward purity, of which the external is symbolical, can only be obtained by the exercise of the virtues, it evidently follows, that the purifications were symbols of the purifying moral virtues. And the latter part of the proposition may be easily inferred, from the passage already cited from the Phædrus of Plato, in which he compares initiation and inspection to the blessed vision of intelligible natures; an employment which can alone belong to the energies of contemplative virtue. But the whole of this is rendered indisputable by the following remarkable testimony of Olympiodorus, in his excellent MS. Commentary on the Phædo of Plato. "In the sacred rites," says he, "popular purifications are in the first place brought forth, and after these such as are more arcane. But in the third place, col-