Beliefs which are spread among many peoples of the world relate the immortality of the soul to the heavenly bodies. It was for long naïvely imagined that a new sun was created every evening, or at least every winter, and a new moon born each month, and traces of this primitive idea survived in the religion of antiquity and persist even in our modern speech. But when it was realised that the same celestial luminaries reappeared and resumed their ardour after their fires had died and they had ceased to shine, that the stars which were lit at sunset were those which had been extinguished at dawn, their lot was related to that of man, destined like them to be reborn, after death, to a new life. Various savage tribes thus associate the heavenly bodies, and especially the moon, with the resurrection of the dead. The wan circle which sheds its vague light in the darkness of night causes phantoms to appear to haunt vigils and dreams, and is therefore the power which presides over life beyond the tomb. Among the Greeks of the most ancient period Hecate was at one and the same time the goddess of the moon, the summoner of ghosts and the queen of the infernal realm. In the East astrological ideas mingled with this mythology. It was taught that the moon’s cold and damp rays corrupted the flesh of the dead and thus detached from it the soul which finally abandoned the corpse. The Syrians, at the critical times in which the moonbeams exercised a more active influence on this separation, offered sacrifices on tombs, and the threefold commemoration of the dead on the third, the seventh and the fortieth day in a part of the Eastern Church had its earliest origin in these offerings of the sidereal cults.[217]