It is in this way, as it would seem, that the lion-headed monster of the Mithraic chapels must be explained. Ahriman, the god girt with the serpent which represents the earth, has rebelled against Ormuzd or Jupiter, and has been marked with the thunderbolt which has cast him down from heaven. But he remains none the less lord of his own domain, the earth, his sway over which is shown by the sceptre which he wields while standing upon it[908]. As for the keys which he bears, they are doubtless those of the gates behind which he keeps the souls and bodies of men, as the Orphics said, imprisoned, until he is compelled to release them by a higher power[909]. In all this, his functions do not go beyond those of the Greek Hades, with whom Plutarch equates him. It is however, possible that he was conceived by the Mithraists as occupying a slightly different place in the material universe from that of his Greek prototype. The true realm of Hades was generally placed by the Greeks below the earth, but that of the Mithraic Ahriman may possibly be just outside it. M. Cumont shows many reasons for supposing the lion-headed god to be connected with the idea of destiny[910], and in one of the very few contemporary writings which make distinct allusion to the Mithraic tenets, there is something which confirms this view. This occurs in a fragment embedded, as it were, in a Magic Papyrus or sorcerer’s handbook now in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris[911]. The document itself is probably not, as Prof. Albert Dieterich has too boldly asserted, a “Mithraic Liturgy”; but it is evidently connected in some way with the Mithraic worship and begins with a statement that the writer is a priest who has received inspiration from “the great Sun-God Mithras.” M. Georges Lafaye is of opinion that it narrates in apocalyptic fashion the adventures of the soul of a perfect Mithraist on its way to heaven, and this is probably correct, although it is here told for no purpose of edification but as a spell or charm[912]. The soul, if it be indeed she who is speaking, repeatedly complains to the gods whom she meets—including one in white tunic, crimson mantle and anaxyrides or Persian trousers who may be Mithras himself—of “the harsh and inexorable necessity” which has been compelling her so long as she remained in the “lower nature[913].” But the Sphere of Destiny or necessity, as we have seen in the _Pistis Sophia_, was thought to be the one immediately surrounding the earth, and although the document in which we have before met with this idea belongs to a different set of religious beliefs than those here treated of, it is probable that both Gnostic and Mithraist drew it from the astrological theories current at the time which came into the Hellenistic world from Babylon. It is therefore extremely probable that the Mithraists figured Ahriman as ruling the earth from the sphere immediately outside it, and this would