This faith might have remained in its primitive savagery, and therefore for Greece ineffective, but for another religious impulse, that known to us under the name of Orpheus. To the discussion of Orphism the last four chapters IX.-XII. are devoted. In Chapter IX. I have attempted to show that the name Orpheus stands for a real personality. I have hazarded the conjecture that Orpheus came from Crete bringing with him, perhaps ultimately from Egypt, a religion of spiritual asceticism which yet included the ecstasy of the religion of Dionysos. Chapter X. is devoted to the elucidation of the Orphic and Dionysiac mysteries. It has been shown that before the coming of the Orphic and Dionysiac religion the mysteries consisted simply in the handling of certain _sacra_ after elaborate purification. By handling these _sacra_ man came into contact with some divine potency. To this rudimentary mysticism Orphism added the doctrine of the possibility of complete union with the divine. This union was effected in the primitive Cretan rite of the Omophagia by the physical eating of the god; union with the divine was further symbolically effected by the rite of the Sacred Marriage, and union by adoption by the rite of the Sacred Birth. The mission of Orphism was to take these primitive rites, originally of the crudest sympathetic magic, and inform them with a deep spiritual mysticism. The rite of the Omophagia found no place at Eleusis, but the other two sacramental rites of union, the Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth, formed ultimately its central mysteries. With the doctrine and ritual of union with the divine there came as a necessary corollary the doctrine that man could attain the divine attribute of immortality. Orphic eschatology is the subject of Chapter XI. Its highest spiritual form, the belief that perfect purity issued in divinity and hence in immortality, is found expressed in the Orphic tablets. Its lower expression, the belief in a Hades of eternal punishment as contrasted with the shadowy after-world of Homer, is seen in the vases of Lower Italy and the eschatology denounced by Plato. Finally in Chapter XII. it is shown how, as a concomitant to their Eschatology, the Orphics, unlike Homer, evolved a Cosmogony, and with this Cosmogony was ultimately bound up a peculiar and philosophic theology. In the fifth century B.C. the puppet-show of the Olympians was well-nigh played out, but the two gods of the Orphics remained potent. In ritual they worshipped Dionysos, but their theoretical theology recognized Eros as source of all things. The Eros of the Orphics was a mystery-being, a _daimon_ rather than a _theos_, a potency wholly alien to the clear-cut humanities of Olympus. * * * * *