As soon as the students of Comparative Religion attempt to bring forward concrete facts, they are obliged to leave the domain of the mystery-religions and draw their material from the primitive Nature-religions. Here they find the primary conception—a man believes that he unites himself with the divinity by eating portions of him, or—this is a secondary stage of the conception—by consuming some substance which has been marked out for this purpose as representative of the divinity and has had his name attached to it. The following series of examples recurs in all the books:— The dead Pharaoh, when he enters heaven, causes his servants to seize, bind, and slay the gods, and then devours them in order thus to absorb into himself their strength and wisdom, and to become the strongest of all. In Egypt anyone who wishes to become truthful swallows a small image of the goddess of truth. In the Thracian orgiastic worship of Dionysos Sabazios [pg 196] the sacrificial ox is torn to pieces by the participants while yet alive, and swallowed raw. A Bedouin tribe in the Sinai peninsula slaughters, amid chanting, a camel bound upon the altar, and then eagerly drinks its blood and immediately devours the still bloody flesh half raw. The Aztecs, before sacrificing and eating their prisoners of war, give them the name of the deity to whom the sacrifice is offered. Now, by the round-about way of this primitive conception the connexion between Paul’s cultus-feast and that of the Mystery-religions—which cannot be directly shown—is supposed to be established. It is suggested that this primitive conception of union with the god in the cultus, by an act of eating performed with this special purpose, after it had in the normal development of the various religions been transformed or completely laid aside, came to life again in the mysticism of the Mystery-religions and of Paulinism. Mysticism, according to Dieterich’s view, draws its nourishment from the lowest strata of religious ideas. The belief in the union of God and man which, among the cultured classes, was no longer anything but a metaphor, rises up again from below with irrepressible power. “Rising from below, the old ideas acquire new power in the history of religion. The revolution from beneath creates new religious life within the primeval, indestructible forms.”_(_164_)_