formed part of the Mithraic teaching, the keys would thus have a meaning analogous to the Orphic release from “the wheel[924].” The other gods who appear on the Mithraic monuments are those known to us in classical mythology and are represented under the usual human forms made familiar by Greek and Roman art. By the side of, but in a subordinate position to Jupiter, we find, if M. Cumont be justified in his identifications, nearly all the “great gods” of the Greco-Roman pantheon. Five of these, that is to say, Jupiter himself, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury may be intended as symbols of the planets which, then as now, bore these names. But there are others such as Juno, Neptune and Amphitrite, Pluto and Proserpine, Apollo, Vulcan, and Hercules who cannot by any possibility be considered as planetary signs[925]. M. Cumont’s theory about these divinities is, if one understands him rightly, that these are really Persian or Avestic gods, such as Verethragna, represented under the classic forms of their Greek counterparts to make them attractive to their Roman worshippers[926]. This does not seem very probable, because the Persians did not figure their gods in human form[927]. Nor is there any reason to think that the Mithraists confined themselves to the _theocrasia_ or the practice of discovering their own gods in the divinities of the peoples around them which we have seen so rife in Greece, Italy, and Egypt. But in the age when the worship of Mithras became popular in the Roman Empire, all paganism was groping its way towards a religion which should include and conciliate all others, and there is much evidence that the votaries of Mithras were especially determined that this religion should be their own. Isis, as we have seen, might proclaim herself as the one divinity whom under many names and in many forms the whole earth adored; but the Mithraists apparently went further and tried to show that their religion contained within itself all the rest. They appear to have first gained access to Rome under an alliance with the priests of Cybele, whose image, with its emasculated attendants the Galli, was transported from Pergamum to the Eternal City during the critical moments of the Second Punic War[928]. Externally there were many analogies between the two cults, and Cybele’s consort Attis, like Mithras, was always represented in a Phrygian cap and anaxyrides. One of the most impressive, if most disgusting practices in the religion of Cybele—the Taurobolium or blood-bath in which a bull was slaughtered over a pit covered with planks pierced with holes through which the blood of the victim dripped upon the naked votary below—was borrowed by the Mithraists, and many of them boast on their funereal inscriptions that they have undergone this ceremony and thereby, as they express it, have been “born again.” The _clarissimi_ and high officials of the Empire who have left records of the kind are careful to note that they are worshippers of “the Great