The connection between the beliefs of the mysteries and the hopes attached to the funeral cult became more intimate as immortality brought the spirits of the dead nearer the celestial divinities. The idea that some few privileged mortals win admission to the banquet of the gods is very ancient. An inscription of Sendjerli in Syria, which goes back to the eighth century before our era, orders sacrifices to be made in order that the soul of King Panamu “may eat and drink with the god Hadad,”[517] and Greek mythology told that certain heroes, such as Heracles, who had been carried off to heaven, had there become the table companions of the gods. Horace states that Augustus, borne to the ethereal summits, will there rest between Hercules and Pollux, “drinking nectar with his rosy lips.”[518] But we have seen elsewhere that apotheosis, or deification, which was at first the privilege of an aristocracy, became the common lot of all pious souls,[519] and that the Elysian Fields were transferred from the depths of the infernal realm to the upper spheres of the world. The repast of the Blessed was thus transported to heaven.[520] This removal to the region of the stars seems to have been first made in the astral religion of Syria, but it was commonly accepted in western paganism. This is why in funeral reliefs of the Roman period, in which the dead are shown banqueting, such representations are placed in the upper part of the stele, above the scenes of earthly life which fill the lower portion of the stone. The emperor Julian is giving us a mocking picture of this repast of the heroes, when in one of his satires he shows us the shades of the Caesars at table immediately beneath the moon, in the highest zone of the atmospheres—in accordance with the ideas of the Stoics.[521] Men readily fashioned the heroes who tasted the joys of Olympus on the pattern of the celestial divinities—resplendent with light, clothed in garments of dazzling whiteness, their heads crowned with rays or surrounded by a luminous nimbus, singing, as in a Greek symposium, melodious hymns. The philosophers of course gave a symbolical interpretation of the intoxication of the souls which took part in the feast, explaining it as the ravishing of reason penetrated by divine intelligence. We will return to their doctrines presently.