The Platonists sometimes adopted the same conception and combined it with psychological ideas, a development of those we recalled in connection with solar immortality (p. 103). It was held that when the soul came down to earth it first received an ethereal garment of almost immaterial purity; then, imagination being added to reason, a solar fluid surrounded it; then a lunar integument made it subject to the passions; and finally a carnal body was the cause of its ignorance of divine truths and of its blind foolishness. It successively lost with these wrappings the inclinations or faculties which were bound with them, when after death it went back again to the place of its origin.[254] The conception of the triple ascension of souls rested fundamentally on a rudimentary astronomy, for it confused the five planets with the fixed stars, discriminating from both only the sun and the moon. But for long the system which divided the heavens into seven superimposed spheres, enveloped by an eighth sphere which was the limit of the universe, had imposed itself not only on the learned but also on the authors of pagan apocalypses. The eschatological doctrine which triumphed at the end of paganism is in agreement with this theory, generally admitted by the science of the period. This doctrine is certainly of Chaldeo-Persian origin, and was spread in the first century especially by the mysteries of Mithras.[255] Then, in the second century, the Pythagorean Numenius introduced it into philosophic speculation. Man’s soul was held to descend from the height of heaven to this sublunary world, passing through the planetary spheres, and thus at its birth it acquired the dispositions and the qualities peculiar to each of these stars. After death it went back to its celestial home by the same path. Then as it traversed the zones of the sky, it divested itself of the passions and faculties which it had acquired during its descent to earth, as it were of garments. To the moon it surrendered its vital and alimentary energy, to Mercury its cupidity, to Venus its amorous desires, to the sun its intellectual capacities, to Mars its warlike ardour, to Jupiter its ambitious dreams, to Saturn its slothful tendencies. It was naked, disencumbered of all sensibility, when it reached the eighth heaven, there to enjoy, as a sublime essence, in the eternal light where lived the gods, bliss without end. In the mysteries of Mithras a ladder composed of seven different metals served as a symbol of this passage of souls through the spheres, astrology placing each of the planets in relation with one of these metals, lead with Saturn, gold with the sun, silver with the moon and so on.[256]