We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity of early Greek religion. Yet, apart always from Plotinus, who is singularly aloof, most of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous influences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults. The union of man with God came regularly through _Ekstasis_--the soul must get clear of its body--and _Enthousiasmos_--the God must enter and dwell inside the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood of their God-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some substitute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kourêtes with their Zeus Kourês[150:1] and those strange hierophants of the 'Men's House' whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thera, would have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the fall of Hellenism. 'Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her bridegroom,' says Markos the Gnostic,[150:2] 'that thou mayst be what I am and I what thou art.' 'I in thee, and thou in me!' is the ecstatic cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been 'Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman'.[150:3] In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a mediator between the seeker after God and his goal. Mithras himself saw a Mesîtês, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge which he reveals to the outsider. The circumstances out of which these systems grew have left their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual, the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis, when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century B. C. established their own temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher explanation known only to the great master in Jerusalem, in Egypt, in Babylon, or perhaps in some unexplored and ever-receding region of the east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions.