But still another conception is discernible in the feasts of the mysteries and mingles with the first: it is thought that the god himself is eaten when some sacred animal is consumed. This idea goes back to the most primitive savagery, as is seen in the rite of “omophagy” in which certain votaries of Bacchus fiercely tore the raw flesh of a bull with their teeth and devoured it. Undoubtedly there was originally a belief that the strength of the sacrificed animal was thus acquired, like the superstition of the native African hunters who eat a slain lion’s heart in order to gain his courage. Similarly, if a victim be regarded as divine, to consume it is to participate in its divinity. “Those,” says Porphyry,[280] “who wish to receive into themselves the soul of prophetic animals absorb their principal vital organs, such as the hearts of crows, moles or hawks, and thus they become able to speak oracles, like a god.” Similarly, the Syrians ate the fish of Atargatis, a forbidden food which was, however, provided for the initiate after a sacrifice; and those who partook of these mystic repasts were not, like the rest of men, vowed to death, but were saved by the goddess.[281] All means of attaining to godliness were not so crude as these. An important part of the mysteries was the instruction which gave the sacred lore, the “gnosis.” This “gnosis” included the whole of religious learning, that is to say, it was the knowledge of rites as well as of theological and moral truths. It taught above all the origin and the end of man, but it covered all the works of God, and, inasmuch as it explained creation, it formed a system of the world and a theory of nature. In fact the world, being wholly penetrated by a divine energy, was itself a part of God. The close alliance which exists between philosophy and the mysteries, and which is revealed to us especially in the Pythagorean and Hermetic literature,[282] is shown in the value thus given to science. This science, which in the East had always been sacerdotal, was not looked upon as a conquest of reason but as the revelation of a god. Illumined by this god, the initiate entered into communication with him, and consequently himself became divine and was withdrawn from the power of Fate. “They who possess the knowledge (γνῶσις) have deification as their happy end,” said Hermes Trismegistus.[283]