When the soul has suffered even more from the taint to which its contact with matter, the source of evil, exposes it, it is doomed to reincarnate itself in a new body and again to undergo the trial of this life. When it has become incurably corrupt and burdened with evil, it goes down into the depths of Hades. Following Plato, Plotinus and his successors have adopted the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. They have even developed it, as we shall see,[98] together with the whole pessimistic and ascetic conception of life, the conception which looks at birth as a pain and a fall, a temporary subjection to a body from which emancipation must be sought. It is only after this liberation that the soul can reach perfect wisdom; it must no longer be troubled by the senses if it is to attain to the end of existence, to union with God. This union can be realised even during this life in moments of ecstasy, in which the soul rises above thought and gives itself up entirely to love for the ineffable Unity in which it is absorbed. Like many other mystics, Plotinus disdains the ceremonies of positive cults: they were superfluous to the sage who could of himself enter into communion with the supreme Being. But even his disciple Porphyry conceded a greater value to rites and initiations. If they were powerless to lead the partakers of mysteries to the highest degree of perfection, their effect yet was to render men worthy to live among the visible gods who people heaven.[99] But only philosophical wisdom could rise to the intelligible world and the Unknowable. The principle of a mystical relation between man and the divinity was to lead Neo-Platonism to more and more reverence for religious traditions. For it was held that in the past the revelation of truth had been granted by Heaven not only to divine Plato and the sages of Greece, but to all the founders of barbarous cults and authors of sacred writings. They all communicated profound teaching, which they sometimes hid beneath the veil of allegory. Inspired by the symbolism of the Pythagoreans, the last representatives of Greek philosophy claimed to rediscover the whole of Platonic metaphysics and the Platonic doctrine of immortality in the myths and rites of paganism. The speeches of Julian the Apostate on the Sun-King and the Mother of the Gods are characteristic examples of this bold exegesis, destitute of all critical and even all common sense, which was adopted by the last champions of the old beliefs. * * * * *