Taylor - Eleusianian and Bacchic Mysteries.pdf - Platonic Philosophy

Bacchic Mysteries. 119the sun, govern the world, and tread on Tartarus. The stars answer thee, the gods rejoice, the hours and seasons return by thyappointment, and the elements serve thee."For all this easily follows, if we consider it asaddressed to the fountain-deity of nature,subsisting in the Demiurgus, and which isthe exemplar of that nature which flourishesin the lunar orb, and throughout the material world, and from which the deity itselfof the moon originally proceeds. Hence, asthis fountain immediately depends on thelife-giving goddess Rhea, the reason is obvious, why it was formerly worshiped as themother of the gods and as all the mundane:are contained in the super-mundane gods,the other appellations are to be considered asnames of the several mundane divinities produced by this fountain, and in whose essencethey are likewise contained.But to proceed with our inquiry, I shall,in the next place, prove that the differentpurifications exhibited in these rites,in conjunction with initiation and the epopteiawere symbols of the gradation of disciplines