“Aureus coluber in sinum demittitur consecratis et eximitur rursus ab inferioribus partibus atque imis.”[677] In the Orphic Hymn 52, Bacchus is invoked by ὑποκόλπιε,[678] which indicates that the god enters into man as if through the female genitals.[679] According to the testimony of Hippolytus, the hierophant in the mystery exclaimed ἱερον ἔτεκε πότνια κοῦρον, Βριμὼ βριμόν (the revered one has brought forth a holy boy, Brimos from Brimo). This Christmas gospel, “Unto us a son is born,” is illustrated especially through the tradition[680] that the Athenians “secretly show to the partakers in the Epoptia, the great and wonderful and most perfect Epoptic mystery, _a mown stalk of wheat_.”[681] The parallel for the motive of death and resurrection is the motive of losing and finding. The motive appears in religious rites in exactly the same connection, namely, in spring festivities similar to the Hierosgamos, where the image of the god was hidden and found again. It is an uncanonical tradition that Moses left his father’s house when twelve years old to teach mankind. In a similar manner Christ is lost by his parents, and they find him again as a teacher of wisdom, just as in the Mohammedan legend Moses and Joshua lose the fish, and in his place Chidher, the teacher of wisdom, appears (like the boy Jesus in the temple); so does the corn god, lost and believed to be dead, suddenly arise again from his mother into renewed youth. (That Christ was laid in the manger is suggestive of fodder. Robertson, therefore, places the manger as parallel to the liknon.) We understand from these accounts why the Eleusinian mysteries were for the mystic so rich in comfort for the hope of a better world. A beautiful Eleusinian epitaph shows this: “Truly, a beautiful secret is proclaimed by the blessed Gods! Mortality is not a curse, but death a blessing!” The hymn to Demeter[682] in the mysteries also says the same: “Blessed is he, the earth-born man, who hath seen this! Who hath not shared in these divine ceremonies, He hath an unequal fate in the obscure darkness of death.” Immortality is inherent in the Eleusinian symbol; in a church song of the nineteenth century by Samuel Preiswerk we discover it again: “The world is yours, Lord Jesus, The world, on which we stand, Because it is thy world It cannot perish. Only the wheat, before it comes Up to the light in its fertility, Must die in the bosom of the earth First freed from its own nature.