THE EEV. W. ST. CLAIR TISDALL^ D.D., ON MITHRAISM. 243 



to unite into one the many varying forms of Physiolatry repre- 

 sented by all the religions of tlie Eoman world, with the sohtary 

 exception of Judaism and Christianity. At the same time it 

 tended more and more to promote the worship of the Emperor 

 as the representative and in some sense an incarnation* of the 

 Sungod, who was the most widely adored deity of the East, and was 

 worshipped under various names in the Westf also. Such a 

 religion had much to commend it to philosophers, soldiers, and 

 statesmen alike. It formed a specially close alliance with 

 Stoicism. It allied itself, too, with the worship of the Great 

 Mother,! the Earth-Goddess, whether called Cybele, Isis,§ 

 Demeter, Ceres, Khea or by other names, and at least did 

 nothing to discourage the licentious|| rites connected with too 

 many of these deities. Yet the strange rites and imposing 



that Adonis is the Sun, as is Attis : Mater detim is the Earth, Osiris is 

 the Sun, and Iris the Moon. So in cap. xxiii, it is stated that Hadad and 

 Atargatis are the Sun and the Earth. Cf. also cap. xx, etc. 



* " When the Caesars of the third century pretended to be gods 

 descended from heaven to the earth, the justification of their imaginary 

 claims had as its corollary the establishment of a public worship of the 

 divinity from whom they believed themselves the emanations " (Cumont, 

 The Mysteries of Miihra, Eng. Ed., p. 185). 



t "Erom the time of Plato and Aristotle, Greek philosophy regarded 

 the celestial bodies as animate and divine creatures. Stoicism furnished 

 new arguments in favour of this opinion ; while Neo-Pythagoreanism 

 and Neo-Platonism insisted still more emphatically on the sacred 

 character of the luminary which is the ever-present image of the 

 intelligible God" {op. cit., p. 184). 



I " Erom the moment of the discovery of traces of the Persian cult in 

 Italy, we find it intimately associated with that of the Magna Mater of 

 Pessinus, which had been solemnly adopted by the Poman people three 

 centuries before " {op. cit.^ p. 86). 



§ Cf. Apuleius, Met. xi, cap. 22-24. Isis identifies herself with other 

 goddesses, such as Deto mater, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Proserpina, 

 Oeres, Juno, Bellona, Hecate, and claims to be " reruni naturae parens " 

 in Met. xi, cap. 5 : cf. capp. 2 and 11. 



II On conduct in temples of Isis, for example, vide Ovid, Amoves, Lib. ii, 

 El. ii, 25: Juvenal, Sat. vi, 488: Josephus, Ant. Jud., Lib. xviii, 

 §§ 65 sqq. There can be nothing to wonder at in the conduct of the 

 devotees of Isis when we remember that she was goddess of fertility. So 

 in Macrobius, Saturnalia, Ijib. i, cap. 20, fin. : '* Isis ... est vel terra 

 vel natura rerum subiaciens soli. Hinc est, quod continuatis uberibus 

 corpus deae omne dense tur." Vide also the passage on Isis and Osiris 

 translated (from Maspero's Les Inscriptions des Pyramides de Saqqarah, 

 Paris, 1894) in Budge's " Book of the Dead," Introduction to Translation, 

 p. cxxxiv. Athanasius {Kaja *EX.\,?)i/wi/, cap. 26) sajs that the heathen 

 held that : e/c fxev yup ^lo<s rrjt/ 7raLho(p0opLav kcu ttju fxoL-^etav, e/c r/ys 

 'A(ppodiTr]<i TTji' TTopuet'av, kol e/c fi^v 'Pea? ty^v aaeXr^ieiav e/c he "Apeo^ 

 rov<i (popovfj KCU uWiov uXXa roiavia jbLe/uaOrjKaati^. 



