In the nobles’ poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests’ gods, are unhonoured.[485] But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra, the enthusiast-searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of the great early time are not to be found pure, any more than in Jakob Böhme the cobbler.[486] That is the second difficulty. _The great early religions, too, were the possession of a class_, and neither accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence. And excavation, therefore, important as it is in respect of the Classical country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early Classical _religion_ as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaventura. But Æschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great priestly tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who made the Demeter-cult their centre (thereby indicating where the kernel of that mythology is to be sought), and earlier still were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic reformation of the seventh century; and, finally, there are the fragments of Pherecydes and Epimenides, who were not the first _but the last_ dogmatists of a theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable sin, visited upon the children and the children’s children, was known to Hesiod and Solon, as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of “Hybris.”[487] Plato, however, as an Orphic opponent of the Homeric conception of life, sets forth very ancient doctrines of hell and the judgment of the dead in his _Phædo_. We know the tremendous formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the Yea of the agon, which arose, certainly by 1100 at latest, as a protest of Waking-Consciousness against Being--σῶμα σῆμα, that splendid Classical body a grave! Here man is no longer _feeling_ himself as a thing of breeding, strength, and movement; he _knows_ himself and is terrified by what he knows. Here begins the Classical askesis, which by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary suicide, seeks deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely erroneous interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as _ascetics_ that they did so. These “contemporaries” of Descartes and Leibniz were brought up in the strict traditions of the old great Orphism, which were as faithfully preserved in the almost claustral meditation-schools--old and famous holy places--as Gothic Scholasticism was treasured in the wholly intellectual universities of the Baroque. From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line runs straight forward to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to “Orpheus.”