That we have here a combination of two still unproved hypotheses is not sufficiently emphasised. In the Mystery-religions ancient cults certainly enter into direct union with higher religious conceptions, so that the general presupposition on which this hypothesis of Comparative Religion is based is to a certain extent admissible. But whether precisely this primitive conception of the mystic fellowship created by eating and drinking the god awakened to new life in them, must remain an open question, since our information does not suffice to prove [pg 197] it. Of an eating of the god there is nowhere any mention. And the primitive Mysteries were not founded on this idea. Rather, they consist essentially in the representation of the actions performed by the divinity, and rest on the thought that the reproduction of these events will create in the participant some kind of corresponding reality. It is a symbolism which is charged with a certain energy, a drama which becomes real. This being so, the significance of the cultus-meal comes much less into view than that of the pattern actions which had to be further developed and interpreted. If we possess so few typical statements about the Mystery-feasts, is it not partly because they had no very remarkable features and did not take a very exalted position in the hierarchy of cultus-acts? If in the Paris Magic-papyrus we really possess a Mithra-liturgy, and if the inferences and explanations which Dieterich has attached to it are sound, then we have proof that in this developed cultus of the second century the highest sacrament was a pictorial mystery in which the “mystes” believed that he in some way experienced the heavenly journey of the soul which he, along with others, enacted. In any case, the assertion that in the Mystery-religions the ancient cultus-conception of a union with the divinity effected by a meal, came to life again, goes far beyond what can be proved. That union is, even in its secondary forms, always closely connected with a sacrificial feast, and cannot properly be detached from it. The sacrificial feast, however, is not a feature in the Mystery-religions, and so far as we can get a glimpse of their beginnings never had any supreme importance in them. The interpretation of these cults on the analogy of the primitive religions of various races, ancient or modern, who devoured oxen, camels, or prisoners of war as substitutes for the divinity, cannot therefore be established.