Even if we assume the earlier Jewish cult of Tammuz to have been swept away in the Captivity, the new conditions would tend to stimulate similar popular cults. When, after the Exile, the conception of Yahweh began under Perso-Babylonian influences to alter in the direction of a universalist theism, the common tendency to seek a nearer God was bound to come into play. There is no more universal feature in religious history than the recession of the High Gods. [181] The more "supreme" a deity becomes, in popular religion, the more generally does popular devotion tend to elicit Son-Gods or Goddesses who seem more likely to be "hearers and answerers of prayer." Sacred Books certainly tend to check such a reversion; and in Islam the check has been successful in virtue of the very fact that Allah, like the early Yahweh, is in effect conceived as a racial God, or God of a single cult. But the tendency is seen at work all over the earth. The vogue of Apollo, of Dionysos, of Herakles, of Tammuz-Adonis, of Krishna, of Buddha, of Balder, of Athênê, of the Virgin Mary, of the countless deities propitiated by savage peoples who ignore their Supreme Gods, are all testimonies to the natural craving of religious ignorance for a near God. The same craving certainly subsisted among the Hebrews in so far as it was not completely laid by organized legalism. And seeing that the redactors of the Sacred Books had actually reduced many early deities--Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Daoud = David, Moses, Joshua, and Samson--to the status of patriarchs and heroes, [182] the craving would among some be relatively strengthened. Jews who in time of trouble chronically reverted to alien Gods and alien rites, even as did the Greeks and Romans, could not conceivably fail altogether to adopt or cherish cults analogous to those of Dionysos, Adonis, Osiris, so popular among the neighbouring peoples. The hypothesis forced upon us by the whole history, then, is that there had subsisted in Jewry, in original connection with a sacrificial rite of Jesus the Son of the Father, a Sacrament of a Hero-God Jesus, whose Name was strong to save. If it took the form of a Sacrament of Twelve, with the ritual-representative of the God, it would be closely analogous to the traditional Sacrament of Twelve in which Aaron [the Anointed One = Messiah] and the [twelve] elders of Israel "ate bread with Moses' father-in-law before God." [183] Behind that narrative lies a ritual practice. A sacrament of bread and wine is further indicated in the mention of the mythic Melchisedek, "King of Peace" and priest of "El Elyon," [184] "without father and without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days or end of life, but made like unto the Son of God," who thus became for Christists a type of Jesus. [185] A sacramental banquet of twelve seems to have been involved in the sacrificial ritual of the Temple itself, where a presiding priest and twelve others daily officiated. [186]