The original idea of the bird-soul was transformed into that of the soul lifted aloft by a bird. It was in Syria that this change took place.[392] A widely held belief in the Roman period was that the soul was carried away by an eagle, which in Syria was the bird of the sun. The sun being conceived as a winged disk which flew through the celestial spaces could easily be connected with an eagle. The king of birds was the servant or the incarnation of the star-king, to whom he bore his precious burden. This is why an eagle, preparing for flight and holding the crown of victory, is a usual motif of sepulchral decoration at Hierapolis and throughout northern Syria. The powerful bird of prey lifted not with his claws, as he did Ganymede, but on his back, mortals who rose to heaven. This soul-bearing eagle passed to Italy with the ceremonial of the apotheosis. At the funeral rites of emperors at Rome there was always fastened to the top of the pyre, on which the corpse was to be consumed, an eagle which was supposed to bear aloft the monarch’s soul, and art frequently represents the busts of the Caesars resting on an eagle in the act of taking flight, by way of suggesting their apotheosis. The eagle, which is the bird of the Baals, solar gods, carries to his master those who have been his servants and representatives in the world below. This kind of aviation was not peculiar to monarchs. The eagle often has this meaning in funeral art. I will instance a stele, found in Rome and preserved in the museum of Copenhagen.[393] On this a young man, draped in a toga, is comfortably seated on an eagle, which is rising to the sky; to his right a winged child, bearing a torch, seems to point out the way to him. It is Phosphorus, the morning star, whom Roman art often represented in this form, before the chariot of the Sun. An altar recalls the cult of which the dead man will henceforth be the object on earth, and a wreath on the pediment stands for the victory which he has won over death. All these supposed methods of reaching heaven are most primitive: they start from the supposition that a _load_ has to be lifted up; they hardly imply a separation of body and soul; and they are antecedent to the distinctions which philosophers established between different parts of man’s being. They are religious survivals of very ancient conceptions which only vulgar minds still interpreted literally. These mechanical means of raising oneself to the starry vault carry us back to an extremely low stage of beliefs. Hence theologians no longer accepted them save as symbols. Other doctrines of a more advanced character were developed and these constituted the true teaching of the great Oriental mysteries, just as they had secured the adhesion of thinking men. They connected the ascent of the soul after death with physical and ethical theories and thus caused sidereal immortality to enter into the order of the universe.[394]