External evidence tells us that already, a thousand years before the Aryans began to move, Egypt had mapped out the stars in constellations and divided the zodiac into twelve signs, and we are told by Aristotle that the Egyptians “excelled in mathematics”. But if there was among the priests a “philosophy” in our sense of the word, we know little of it—perhaps because truth, unadorned by myth, was regarded in those days as something dangerous, to be kept religiously secret from all save those who were specially prepared to receive it. This idea of inner religious teachings, guarded carefully from the ignorant and impure, survived in great force among the Greeks themselves, and we come across references in their philosophy to institutions called _Mysteries_, which were evidently felt by them to lie at the core of their national and intellectual life. Thus that hard-worked little English trisyllable, without which minor poetry and sensational journalism could barely eke out a miserable existence, has a long and dignified history, into which we must pry a little farther if we wish to understand how Greek thought and feeling have passed over into our language. We have adopted from Latin the word _initiate_, which meant ‘to admit a person to these Mysteries’, and the importance attached to secrecy is shown by the fact that ‘muein’, the Greek for ‘to _initiate_‘, meant originally ‘to keep silent’. From it the substantive ‘mu-sterion’ was developed, thence the Latin ‘mysterium’, and so the English word. The secrets of the Greek Mysteries were guarded so jealously and under such heavy penalties that we still know very little about them. All we can say is that the two principal ideas attaching to them in contemporary minds were, firstly, that they revealed in some way the inner meaning of external appearances, and secondly, that the “initiate” attained immortality in a sense different from that of the uninitiated. The ceremony he went through symbolized dying in order to be “born again”, and when it was over, he believed that the mortal part of his soul had died, and that what had risen again was immortal and eternal. Such were the associations which St. Paul had in mind, and which he called to the imaginations of his hearers, when he made use of the impressive words: “Behold, I tell you a mystery!” And it is the same whenever the word occurs elsewhere in the New Testament and in writings of that period, for it retained its technical meaning and associations well on into the Christian era.[26]