In a special degree the Osirian and Dionysian and Mithraic cults seem to have insisted on the doctrine of immortality correlatively with the doctrine of eternal punishment; and insofar as Mithraism is to be known from the present form of the Zendavesta, which is but a revised portion of the older Mazdean literature, it appealed to the imagination on this side at least as winningly as did the Jesuist literature in respect, for instance, of the Apocalypse. Mithra was the God of the upper and the nether world, the keeper of the keys of heaven and hell, of life and death; and, like Osiris, he was the judge of men's deeds. Like the other Saviour-cults, too, Mithraism anticipated Christism in evolving the attraction of a Mother-Goddess, the worship of Cybelê being adapted to his as it had been to that of Attis. In one other aspect it seems to have run closely parallel to early Jesuism. The singular phrase in the Apocalypse about garments "washed in the blood of the Lamb" points to an early Jesuist use of the practice of the kriobolium, which with the taurobolium was one of the most striking of the Mithraic rites. In these repulsive ceremonies the ram or bull--always young, on the principle that the sacrifice must be pure--was slain over a grating, so that the blood dripped on the initiate, who was placed in a pit beneath, and who was instructed to wear the blood-stained garment for some days. It was believed that the ceremony had a supreme saving grace; and the initiate was solemnly described as in æternum renatus, "born again for eternity." In regard to both animals the symbolism was partly astronomical, having latterly reference to the sun's entrance into the constellations of the Bull and the Ram at different stages of his course. Mithra's oldest and best-known symbol was the bull; but inasmuch as the sun had anciently been seen by the Chaldean astronomers to be in the constellation Aries at the spring season, the beginning of the ancient year, the lamb had long been likewise adopted into the mysteries of the solar cults. About the beginning of the Christian era the year-opening constellation was Pisces; and the Divine Fish accordingly figures to a great extent in early Christian symbols. As we have seen, the primordial Jesuism, with its Lamb "slain from the founding of the world," probably conceived of its deity in terms of the astronomical symbol; but the prominence given by Mithraism to the blood-ritual would serve to bring that into disuse among the Gentile Christists, whose creed further made Jesus the final paschal sacrifice, and reduced the apocalyptic phrase to a moral metaphor. Nonetheless, the rites and theories of the great pagan cults, all of which flourished in Palestine itself in the pre-Roman period, must be recognized as factors in its creation.