If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the _Astral_ soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is _matter_, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or _Magna-mater_, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or _nous_). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystæ; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above. Such was the chief object of the Mysteries represented as diabolical by theology, and ridiculed by modern symbologists. To disbelieve that there exist in man certain arcane powers, which, by psychological study he can develop in himself to the highest degree, become an hierophant and then impart to others under the same conditions of earthly discipline, is to cast an imputation of falsehood and lunacy upon a number of the best, purest, and most learned men of antiquity and of the middle ages. What the hierophant was allowed to see at the last hour is hardly hinted at by them. And yet Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, and many others knew and affirmed their reality.