It must not be supposed, however, that these associations concerned themselves entirely with what we now call religion. The state, in cities like Athens, regarded them with great jealousy, and did its best to prevent them from forming a hierarchy by stipulating that their officers should only hold office for a year. This naturally prevented any continuity of policy such as a corporation like the priesthood of Amen could pursue, and set their chiefs upon making hay while the sun shone. Ignorant and degraded as most of their members were, and generally engaged in the pursuit of gain, it is not astonishing that they should thus have lent themselves to the worst and most dangerous because most profitable superstitions. The priests and especially the priestesses of the confraternities were always ready to lend themselves to the practices of divination and magic, to the sale of love-philtres and poisons[95], the interpretations of dreams and miraculous cures. To these charlatans came everyone who wanted his or her fortune told, or who wished to get rid of a rival, or to obtain the favour of a disdainful lover, or was simply tormented with idle fears or by some bodily disease incurable by regular means. “The set of charlatans and market-men who hang about and wait round the altars of the Great Mother and Serapis; and who manufacture oracles either out of their own heads or by haphazard out of certain books for the benefit of house-slaves and silly women” is the contemptuous way in which Plutarch describes these impostors[96]. Yet even in this way much was doubtless done to spread the knowledge of foreign religions; for many must have resorted to the foreign temples for magic or divination who would never have thought of joining the association by which they were maintained, and in magic it is always the least known gods and those worshipped by the races of lowest culture who are thought to be the most powerful. Moreover, many of these associations in time purified themselves by a sort of process of elimination from these undesirable accessories, and, so soon as they succeeded in attracting the adhesion of a sufficient number of respectable people, managed to get the god they were formed to worship enrolled among the native deities of the state or city. It was in this way that foreign gods like Serapis and Mithras, from being the divinities of a handful of foreign slaves, merchants or hostages, came, as we shall see, to occupy the highest places in the national worship of the Roman Empire. Thus Lucian tells us the story of the impostor Alexander of Abonoteichos, who with the help of a tame serpent with a cardboard mask gave himself out as the priest of an incarnation of Asklepios the Greek god of healing, and founded an association for its worship in Nicomedia in Bithynia. Later, he persuaded one Rutilianus, a man of consular rank who seems to have had influence at the Court of