This mythological conception of salvation was combined in the mysteries with another, which was more scientific, that of fatalism, which was the chief dogma imposed by astrology on the Roman world. Death is for man the most inevitable and the hardest necessity. _Fatum_ often denotes the unalterable term of life; and this end, which diviners could foresee but could not delay, ought, according to the law of our kind, to overtake the soul as well as the body. But the Oriental cults never ceased to claim that the celestial powers who escaped the rule of Destiny, which extends only to the sublunary world, were also able to withdraw thence their faithful followers. As the emperor was not subject to Fate because he was god, so he who had been initiated and had acquired the same quality was, as a funeral inscription expressed it, “exempt from the lot of death.”[273] Those who had taken part in the occult ceremonies of the sect and were instructed in its esoteric doctrines were alone able to prolong their existence beyond the term fixed by the stars at their birth. By the virtue of these rites pious souls were withdrawn from this fate-ridden earth and were led, enfranchised from their servitude, to a divine world. Thus those who had acceded to a religious initiation obtained eternal life, like the great men whose celestial origin had predestined them thereto. By what rites was wrought this “deification” (ἀποθέωσις), or rather this “immortalisation” (ἀπαθανατισμός)? The soul, enclosed in the body, was by its very contact with matter exposed to pollution, “as pure and clear water poured into the bottom of a muddy well is troubled.”[274] The mysteries never conceived the soul as absolutely immaterial: it was a subtle and light essence, but one coarsened and weighed down by sin, which thus altered its divine nature and caused its decomposition and loss.[275] In order therefore that immortality might be ensured to the soul, it must be cleansed of its stains. The pagan religions employed a whole set of ablutions and purifications for restoring his first integrity to the mystic. He could wash in consecrated water in accordance with certain prescribed forms. This was in reality a magic rite: the cleanliness of the body wrought by sympathy a veritable disinfection of the inner spirit, the water clearing off its taints or expelling the evil demons which caused pollution. Or else the initiate sprinkled himself with or drank the blood either of a slaughtered victim or of the priests themselves. These rites arose from the belief that the fluid which flows in our veins is a vivifying principle, able to communicate new existence.[276] The man who had received baptism by blood in the _taurobolium_ was reborn for eternity (_in aeternum renatus_),[277] and when, foul and repulsive, he left the sacred ditch, he was adored as a god by those present. Elsewhere purifications by air and fire were found united to that by