If during the _Aporreta_ or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, “Blessed is he who hath seen those _common concerns_ of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter,” says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the “dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify _occultly_ the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical nature ... that the soul, indeed, till purified by philosophy, suffers death through its union with the body.” The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is _punished_ through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that “when the soul has descended into generation (from its _half_-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire;”[171] he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.