Inversely, when death had dissolved the elements which formed the human composite, when the soul had left the carnal prison which enclosed it, the sun once more drew it to himself. As his ardent heat caused vapours and clouds to rise from the earth and the seas, so he brought back to himself the invisible essence which animated the body. He exercised on the earth both a physical and a psychical attraction. Human reason reascended to its original source and returned to its divine home. The rays of the god were the vehicles of souls when they rose aloft to the higher regions.[241] He was the anagogue (ἀναγωγεύς) who withdrew spirits from matter which soiled them. Just as he sent the planets away from him and brought them back by a series of emissions and absorptions, so he caused his burning effluvia to descend to the beings whom he called to life, and so he gathered them after their death that they might rise to him once more. Thus a cycle of migrations caused souls to circulate between the sky and the earth, as the stars alternately drew away from and returned to the radiant focus, heart and spirit of the Great All, which called forth and directed their eternal revolutions. It is easy to understand how this coherent and, it may be said, magnificent theology, founded on the discoveries of ancient astronomy at its zenith, imposed on Roman paganism the cult of the invincible Sun, the master of all nature, the creator and saviour of man. A mass of literary evidence and a number of figured monuments prove how powerful became, under the Roman Empire, the belief that the sun was the god of the dead. Old mythological traditions combined with Chaldean theology and were propagated with the Eastern religions. It was imagined that the deceased, and in particular the emperors, were borne to heaven on the chariot of Helios, or that the eagle, the king of the birds and the servant of the sovereign sun, carried off their souls to bear them to his master. Elsewhere it was the griffin of Apollo or the solar phoenix who was the bearer of the dead or the symbol of immortality. A funeral altar of Rome even bears the characteristic inscription, “_Sol me rapuit_,” “the Sun has seized me up.”[242]