The rites of the Phrygian Sabazius touch the processes of the lower culture at more than one point. In his great oration "on the Crown" (315 B.C.) Demosthenes twits his opponent Æschines in such terms as these: "You assisted your mother in the initiations, you read aloud the books (the ritual prayers), and took part in the rest of the plot. You put on (or, you robed the candidates in) fawn-skins; you sprinkled them with water from the bowl; you purified and rubbed them with clay and bran, then you raised them from their purification, and bade them say, 'I have fled the bad, and found the better.'" On the gold Orphic tablets discovered in South Italy and Crete occur strange phrases: "I, a kid, fell into the milk," "O blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy mortality and hast become divine," which are interpreted with great probability as references to a ritual of milk-baptism in which the initiate was born again. That idea was certain expressed in the mysteries of Isis, which were widely spread in the Eastern Mediterranean (p. 40). Here, too, was a solemn kind of death and re-birth; here, too, lustrations of the purest water, the priestly declaration of the pardon of the {166} gods, the mystic revelation of the Goddess, herself identified with all deities in turn; and here, after the vision, the assurance of a blessed life to come. The candidate for initiation into the rites of Mithra must mount slowly through seven stages. The details of the ritual of the successive grades are unknown; but in accordance with ancient Iranian practice repeated ablutions were imposed till the cleansing waters had washed away all stains of guilt. The Mithraic sacraments so closely resembled Christian usage that they were vehemently denounced by Church writers as a Satanic parody. They were certainly supposed to secure happiness in the world to come. The believer who had passed through the blood-bath of the slaughtered bull was said to be "re-born for ever."