Page:The Pamphleteer (Volume 8).djvu/68

64 parations for philosophical discussion, they have the impudence to oppose their puerile conceptions to the decisions of men of elevated genius and profound investigation, who, happily freed from the danger and drudgery of learning any foreign language, directed all their attention without restraint to the acquisition of the most exalted truth.

It only now remains that we prove, in the last place, that a representation of the descent of the soul formed no inconsiderable part of these mystic shows. This indeed is doubtless occultly insinuated by Virgil, when speaking of the souls of the blessed in Elysium, he adds,

Has omnes, ubi mille rotam volvere per annos,

Lethæum ad fluvium deus evocat agmine magno:

Scilicet nnmemores supera ut convexa revisant,

Rursus et incipiant in corpora velle reverti.

But openly by Apuleius, in the following prayer which Psyche addresses to Ceres: Per ego te frugiferam tuam dextram istam deprecor, per lætificas messium cærimonias, per tacita sacra cistarum, et per famulorum tuorum draconum pinnata curricula, et glebæ Siculæ sulcamina, et currum rapacem, et terram tenacem, et illuminarum Proserpinæ nuptiarum demeacula, et cætera, quæ silentio tegit Eleusis, Atticæ sacrarium; miserandæ Psyches animæ, supplicis tuæ, subsiste. That is, "I beseech thee, by thy fruit-bearing right hand, by the joyful ceremonies of thy harvests, by the occult sacred concerns of thy cistæ, and by the winged car of thy attending dragons, and the furrows of the Sicilian soil, and the rapacious chariot, and the dark descending ceremonies attending the marriage of Proserpine, and the ascending rites which accompanied the luminous invention of thy daughter, and by other arcana which Eleusis the Attic sanctuary conceals in profound silence, relieve the sorrows of thy wretched supplicant Psyche." For the rape of Proserpine signifies the descent of the soul, as is evident from the passage previously adduced from Olympiodorus, in which he says the soul descends Corically; and this is confirmed by the authority of the philosopher Sallust, who, in his book de Diis et Mundo, p. 251, observes, "That the rape of Proserpine is fabled to have taken place about the opposite equinoctial; and by this the descent of souls is implied."