You will probably ask how men succeeded in reconciling this solar immortality with the doctrine which made the moon the abode of the dead. The Greeks, following the Orientals, had been able to make a lunar-solar calendar, and they also constructed an eschatology in which the two great heavenly bodies both played part. They were the two divinities whose help the priests promised to “those who were about to die.”[243] This eschatology is founded on the astrological idea that the moon presides over physical life, over the formation and decomposition of bodies, but that the sun is the author of intellectual life and the master of reason. The doctrine also includes the belief we have already explained elsewhere,[244] that when souls leave the earth, they are still surrounded by a subtle fluid which retains the appearance of the persons whom they formerly animated. The pagan theologians thus admitted that the souls which came down to earth assumed in the sphere of the moon and in the atmosphere these aerial bodies which were regarded as the seat of the vital principle. Inversely, when they rose again to heaven, the function of the moon was to dissolve and to receive these light envelopes, as on earth its damp rays provoked the corruption of the corpse. The soul, thus becoming pure reason (νοῦς), ascended to the sun, the source of all intelligence. According to others the formation of the soul’s integument was begun and its reabsorption was completed in the planetary spheres, and this is why the Neo-Platonist Jamblichus[245] placed the Hades of mythology between the sun and the moon. These theories are not the product of pure philosophical speculations, but have their roots in the old astral religion of the Semites. The mysteries of Mithras, the Chaldaic oracles, and above all Manicheism shared the belief in a lunar-solar immortality of which the source certainly goes back to the tenets of the “Chaldean” priests. * * * * *