_Asclepios-Cult and later mysteries_.--The philosophic sectarians of this later age do not appear to have made a serious attempt to capture the mind of the public; and the popular religious movements for the most part ignored them and their teaching. The Hellenistic religions are as convincedly theistic and idolatrous as the older were. The chief change lay in this, that a man now might to some extent choose his own divinity or--what was even of more import--be chosen by him or her; he was no longer limited to the cults into which he was born. This freedom had already for some time been offered by the ‘thiasoi’; and now in the Hellenistic world, especially through the powerful and wide influence of the cult of Asklepios, the idea was developed of a deity who as Healer and Saviour called all mankind to himself; and it was this significant cult-phenomenon that induced Kerkidas in the above-mentioned passage to include Παιάν, the ‘Healer,’ among the true divinities whose worship ought to supplant that of the older gods. In the treatise called ‘Asclepios’ of the pseudo-Apuleius a long address and prayer to this deity are preserved of which the tone is strikingly {148} Christian.[148.1] “We rejoice in thy divine salvation, because thou hast shown thyself wholly to us; we rejoice that thou hast deigned to consecrate us to eternity, while we are still in these mortal bodies.… We have known thee, oh, true life of the life of man.… Adoring thy goodness we make this our only prayer… that thou wouldst be willing to keep us all our lives in the love of thy knowledge.” _Non-Hellenic mysteries_.--The phenomenon here indicated attests the stronger vitality at this period of personal or individual, as distinct from tribal or political religion; and this was quickened also by the growth of certain non-Hellenic mysteries in the Mediterranean area in the latter centuries of Paganism, notably by the Samothracian, those of Attis and the Great Mother, the Egyptian Isis, and finally in the last period of all of Mithras. In most of these the records allow us to discover many interesting ideas that reappear in early Christianity, such, for instance, as communion with the divinity through sacrament, the mystic death and rebirth of the Catechumen, the saving efficacy of baptism and purification. These rites could satisfy the craving of the mortal to attain to the conviction of immortality and to the ecstatic consciousness of complete or temporary self-absorption in God. But in the mysteries of Sabazios and Cybele and possibly in others this sense of divinity was conveyed to the ‘mystes’ by the simulation of a holy marriage or sex-communion with the God or Goddess; and for this reason the Pagan mysteries were generally attacked by the Christian Fathers as obscene; the {149} charge was unjust on the whole, though the psychic effect of the special act of ritual just alluded to was probably detrimental to the moral imagination.