agree well with his position _upon_ the globe in the monuments where he appears. It is some confirmation of this that, in another part of the Papyrus just quoted, the “World-ruler” (Cosmocrator) is invoked as “the Great Serpent, leader of these gods, who holds the source of Egypt [Qy, The Nile?] and the end of the whole inhabited world [in his hands], who begets in Ocean Pshoi (_i.e._ Fate) the god of gods[914]”; while the Great Dragon or Outer Darkness in the _Pistis Sophia_ is said to surround the earth. That both orthodox Christians and Gnostics like the Valentinians looked upon the Devil, who, as lord of hell, was sometimes identified with Hades, as the Cosmocrator or World-Ruler requires no further demonstration[915], and in this particular as in others the Mithraists may have drawn from the same source as the Gnostic teachers[916]. That they did so in a related matter can be shown by direct evidence. Like the Ophites of the Diagram before described, the Mithraists thought that the soul descended to the body through seven spheres which were those of the “planets” Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and the Sun in that order, which Origen, who mentions the fact, says that the Persian theology declared to be symbolized “by the names of the rest of matter,” and also gave for it “musical reasons[917].” He further describes the different qualities which the soul in her passage receives from each sphere, and which it seems fair to conclude she gives back to them on her reascension. M. Cumont is no doubt right when he attributes the origin of this tenet to the _mathematici_ or astrologers and says that it too came originally from Chaldaea[918]. The seven heavens are also found in many Oriental documents of the time, including the _Book of the Secrets of Enoch_[919] and the _Apocalypse of Baruch_[920]. According to Origen, they were symbolized in the Mithraic chapels by a ladder of eight steps, the first seven being of the metals peculiar to the different planets, _i.e._ lead, tin, copper, iron, an alloy of several metals, silver, and gold, with the eighth step representing the heaven of the fixed stars[921]. The Stoics who held similar views, following therein perhaps the Platonic cosmogony, had already fixed the gate of the sky through which the souls left the heaven of the fixed stars on their descent to the earth in Cancer, and that by which they reascended in Capricorn[922], which probably accounts for the two keys borne by the lion-headed god on the Mithraic monuments, and for those two Zodiacal signs being displayed on his body. The other two signs, _viz._ Aries and Libra, may possibly refer to the places in a horoscope or genethliacal figure which the astrologers of the time called the _Porta laboris_ and _Janua Ditis_ respectively, as denoting the gate by which man “born to labour” enters life, and the “gate of Hades” by which he leaves it[923]. If, as Porphyry says, the doctrine of metempsychosis