The Chaldeans were the first to conceive the idea of an inflexible necessity ruling the universe, instead of gods acting in the world according to their passions, like men in society. They noticed that an immutable law regulated the movements of the celestial bodies, and, in the first enthusiasm of their discovery they extended its effects to all moral and social phenomena. The postulates of astrology imply an absolute determinism. Tyche, or deified fortune, became the irresistible mistress of mortals and immortals alike, and was even worshiped exclusively by some under the empire. Our deliberate will never plays more than a very limited part in our happiness and success, but, among the pronunciamentos and in the anarchy of the third century, blind chance seemed to play with the life of every one according to its fancy, and it can easily be understood that the ephemeral rulers of that period, like the masses, saw in chance the sovereign disposer of their fates.^[45]

The power of this fatalist conception during antiquity may be measured by its long persistence, at least in the Orient, where it originated. Starting from Babylonia,^[46] it spread over the entire Hellenic world, as early as the Alexandrian period, and towards the end of paganism a considerable part of the efforts of the Christian apologists was directed against it.^[47] But it was destined to outlast all attacks, and to impose itself even on Islam.^[48] In Latin Europe, in spite of the anathemas of the church, the belief remained confusedly alive all through the Middle Ages that on this earth everything happens somewhat

The weapons used by the ecclesiastic writers in contending against this sidereal fatalism were taken from the arsenal of the old Greek dialectics. In general, they were those that all defenders of free will had used for centuries: determinism destroys responsibility; rewards and punishments are absurd if man acts under a necessity that compels him, if he is born a hero or a criminal. We shall not dwell on these metaphysical discussions,^[50] but there is one argument that is more closely connected with our subject, and therefore should be mentioned. If we live under an immutable fate, no supplication can change its decisions; religion is unavailing, it is useless to ask the oracles to reveal the secrets of a future which nothing can change, and prayers, to use one of Seneca's expressions, are nothing but "the solace of diseased minds."^[51]

And, doubtless, some adepts of astrology, like the Emperor Tiberius,^[52] neglected the practice of religion, because they were convinced that fate governed all things. Following the example set by the Stoics, they made absolute submission to an almighty fate and joyful acceptance of the inevitable a moral duty, and were satisfied to worship the superior power that ruled the universe, without demanding anything in return. They considered themselves at the mercy of even the most capricious fate, and were like the intelligent slave who guesses the desires of his master to satisfy them, and knows how to make the hardest servitude tolerable.^[53] The masses, however, never reached that height of resignation. They looked at astrology far more from a religious than from a logical standpoint.^[54] The planets and constellations were not only cosmic forces, whose favorable or inauspicious action grew weaker or stronger according to the turnings of a course established for eternity; they were deities who saw and heard, who were glad or sad, who had a voice and sex, who were prolific or sterile, gentle or savage, obsequious or arrogant.^[55] Their anger could therefore be soothed and their favor obtained through rites and offerings; even the adverse stars were not unrelenting and could be persuaded through sacrifices and supplications. The narrow and pedantic Firmicus Maternus strongly asserts the omnipotence of fate, but at the same time he invokes the gods and asks for their aid against the influence of the stars. As late as the fourth century the pagans of Rome who were about to marry, or to make a purchase, or to solicit a public office, went to the diviner for his prognostics, at the same time praying to Fate for prosperity in their undertaking.^[56] Thus a fundamental antinomy manifested itself all through the development of astrology, which pretended to be an exact science, but always remained a sacerdotal theology.

Of course, the more the idea of fatalism imposed itself and spread, the more the weight of this hopeless theory oppressed the consciousness. Man felt himself dominated and crushed by blind forces that dragged him on as irresistibly as they kept the celestial spheres in motion. His soul tried to escape the oppression of this cosmic mechanism, and to leave the slavery of Ananke. But he no longer had confidence in the ceremonies of his old religion. The new powers that had taken possession of heaven had to be propitiated by new means. The Oriental religions themselves offered a remedy against the evils they had created, and taught powerful and mysterious processes for conjuring fate.^[57] And side by side with astrology we see magic, a more pernicious aberration, gaining ground.^[58]

If, from the reading of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, we pass on to read a magic papyrus, our first impression is that we have stepped from one end of the intellectual world to the other. Here we find no trace of the systematic order or severe method that distinguish the work of the scholar of Alexandria. Of course, the doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as those of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of logic, entirely wanting in works of sorcery, that compels reasoning intellects to accept them. Recipes borrowed from medicine and popular superstition, primitive practices rejected or abandoned by the sacerdotal rituals, beliefs repudiated by a progressive moral religion, plagiarisms and forgeries of literary or liturgic texts, incantations in which the gods of all barbarous nations are invoked in unintelligible gibberish, odd and disconcerting ceremonies—all these form a chaos in which the imagination loses itself, a potpourri in which an arbitrary syncretism seems to have attempted to create an inextricable confusion.

However, if we observe more closely how magic operates, we find that it starts out from the same principles and acts along the same line of reasoning as astrology. Born during the same period in the primitive civilizations of the Orient, both were based on a number of common ideas.^[59] Magic, like astrology, proceeded from the principle of universal sympathy, yet it did not consider the relation existing between the stars traversing the heavens, and physical or moral phenomena, but the relation between whatever bodies there are. It started out from the preconceived idea that an obscure but constant relation exists between certain things, certain words, certain persons. This connection was established without hesitation between dead material things and living beings, because the primitive races ascribed a soul and existence similar to those of man, to everything surrounding them. The distinction between the three kingdoms of nature was unknown to them; they were "animists." The life of a person might, therefore, be linked to that of a thing, a tree, or an animal, in such a manner that one died if the other did, and that any damage suffered by one was also sustained by its inseparable associate. Sometimes the relation was founded on clearly intelligible grounds, like a resemblance between the thing and the being, as where, to kill an enemy, one pierced a waxen figure supposed to represent him. Or a contact, even merely passing by, was believed to have created indestructible affinities, for instance where the garments of an absent person were operated upon. Often, also, these imaginary relations were founded on reasons that escape us: like the qualities attributed by astrology to the stars, they may have been derived from old beliefs the memory of which is lost.

Like astrology, then, magic was a science in some respects. First, like the predictions of its sister, it was partly based on observation—observation frequently rudimentary, superficial, hasty, and erroneous, but nevertheless important. It was an experimental discipline. Among the great number of facts noted by the curiosity of the magicians, there were many that received scientific indorsement later on. The attraction of the magnet for iron was utilized by the thaumaturgi before it was interpreted by the natural philosophers. In the vast compilations that circulated under the venerable names of Zoroaster or Hostanes, many fertile remarks were scattered among puerile ideas and absurd teachings, just as in the Greek treatises on alchemy that have come down to us. The idea that knowledge of the power of certain agents enables one to stimulate the hidden forces of the universe into action and to obtain extraordinary results, inspires the researches of physics to-day, just as it inspired the claims of magic. And if astrology was a perverted astronomy, magic was physics gone astray.

Moreover, and again like astrology, magic was a science, because it started from the fundamental conception that order and law exist in nature, and that the same cause always produces the same effect. An occult ceremony, performed with the same care as an experiment in the chemical laboratory, will always have the expected result. To know the mysterious affinities that connect all things is sufficient to set the mechanism of the universe into motion. But the error of the magicians consisted in establishing a connection between phenomena that do not depend on each other at all. The act of exposing to the light for an instant a sensitive plate in a camera, then immersing it, according to given recipes, in appropriate liquids, and of making the picture of a relative or friend appear thereon, is a magical operation, but based on real actions and reactions, instead of on arbitrarily assumed sympathies and antipathies. Magic, therefore, was a science groping in the dark, and later became "a bastard sister of science," as Frazer puts it.

But, like astrology, magic was religious in origin, and always remained a bastard sister of religion. Both grew up together in the temples of the barbarian Orient. Their practices were, at first, part of the dubious knowledge of fetichists who claimed to have control over the spirits that peopled nature and animated everything, and who claimed that they communicated with these spirits by means of rites known to themselves alone. Magic has been cleverly defined as "the strategy of animism."^[60] But, just as the growing power ascribed by the Chaldeans to the sidereal deities transformed the original astrology, so primitive sorcery assumed a different character when the world of the gods, conceived after the image of man, separated itself more and more from the realm of physical forces and became a realm of its own. This gave the mystic element which always entered the ceremonies, a new precision and development. By means of his charms, talismans, and exorcisms, the magician now communicated with the celestial or infernal "demons" and compelled them to obey him. But these spirits no longer opposed him with the blind resistance of matter animated by an uncertain kind of life; they were active and subtle beings having intelligence and will-power. Sometimes they took revenge for the slavery the magician attempted to impose on them and punished the audacious operator, who feared them, although invoking their aid. Thus the incantation often assumed the shape of a prayer addressed to a power stronger than man, and magic became a religion. Its rites developed side by side with the canonical liturgies, and frequently encroached on them.^[61] The only barrier between them was the vague and constantly shifting borderline that limits the neighboring domains of religion and superstition.

This half scientific, half religious magic, with its books and its professional adepts, is of Oriental origin. The old Grecian and Italian sorcery appears to have been rather mild. Conjurations to avert hail-storms, or formulas to draw rain, evil charms to render fields barren or to kill cattle, love philters and rejuvenating salves, old women's remedies, talismans against the evil eye,—all are based on popular superstition and kept in existence by folk-lore and charlatanism. Even the witches of Thessaly, whom people credited with the power of making the moon descend from the sky, were botanists more than anything else, acquainted with the marvelous virtues of medicinal plants. The terror that the necromancers inspired was due, to a considerable extent, to the use they made of the old belief in ghosts. They exploited the superstitious belief in ghost-power and slipped metal tablets covered with execrations into graves, to bring misfortune or death to some enemy. But neither in Greece nor in Italy is there any trace of a coherent system of doctrines, of an occult and learned discipline, nor of any sacerdotal instruction.

Originally the adepts in this dubious art were despised. As late as the period of Augustus they were generally equivocal beggar-women who plied their miserable trade in the lowest quarters of the slums. But with the invasion of the Oriental religions the magician began to receive more consideration, and his condition improved.^[62] He was honored, and feared even more. During the second century scarcely anybody would have doubted his power to call up divine apparitions, converse with the superior spirits and even translate himself bodily into the heavens.^[63]

Here the victorious progress of the Oriental religions shows itself. The Egyptian ritual^[64] originally was nothing but a collection of magical practices, properly speaking. The religious community imposed its will upon the gods by means of prayers or even threats. The gods were compelled to obey the officiating priest, if the liturgy was correctly performed, and if the incantations and the magic words were pronounced with the right intonation. The well-informed priest had an almost unlimited power over all supernatural beings on land, in the water, in the air, in heaven and in hell. Nowhere was the gulf between things human and things divine smaller, nowhere was the increasing differentiation that separated magic from religion less advanced. Until the end of paganism they remained so closely associated that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the texts of one from those of the other.

The Chaldeans^[65] also were past masters of sorcery, well versed in the knowledge of presages and experts in conjuring the evils which the presages foretold. In Mesopotamia, where they were confidential advisers of the kings, the magicians belonged to the official clergy; they invoked the aid of the state gods in their incantations, and their sacred science was as highly esteemed as haruspicy in Etruria. The immense prestige that continued to surround it, assured its persistence after the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. Its tradition was still alive under the Cæsars, and a number of enchanters rightly or wrongly claimed to possess the ancient wisdom of Chaldea.^[66]

And the thaumaturgus, who was supposed to be the heir of the archaic priests, assumed a wholly sacerdotal appearance at Rome. Being an inspired sage who received confidential communications from heavenly spirits, he gave to his life and to his appearance a dignity almost equal to that of the philosopher. The common people soon confused the two,^[67] and the Orientalizing philosophy of the last period of paganism actually accepted and justified all the superstitions of magic. Neo-Platonism, which concerned itself to a large extent with demonology, leaned more and more towards theurgy, and was finally completely absorbed by it.

But the ancients expressly distinguished, "magic," which was always under suspicion and disapproved of, from the legitimate and honorable art for which the name "theurgy"^[68] was invented. The term "magician," (μάγος) which applied to all performers of miracles, properly means the priests of Mazdaism, and a well attested tradition makes the Persians^[69] the authors of the real magic, that called "black magic" by the Middle Ages. If they did not invent it—because it is as old as humanity—they were at least the first to place it upon a doctrinal foundation and to assign to it a place in a clearly formulated theological system. The Mazdean dualism gave a new power to this pernicious knowledge by conferring upon it the character that will distinguish it henceforth.

Under what influences did the Persian magic come into existence? When and how did it spread? These are questions that are not well elucidated yet. The intimate fusion of the religious doctrines of the Iranian conquerors with those of the native clergy, which took place at Babylon, occurred in this era of belief,^[70] and the magicians that were established in Mesopotamia combined their secret traditions with the rites and formulas codified by the Chaldean sorcerers. The universal curiosity of the Greeks soon took note of this marvelous science. Naturalist philosophers like Democritus,^[71] the great traveler, seem to have helped themselves more than once from the treasure of observations collected by the Oriental priests. Without a doubt they drew from these incongruous compilations, in which truth was mingled with the absurd and reality with the fantastical, the knowledge of some properties of plants and minerals, or of some experiments of physics. However, the limpid Hellenic genius always turned away from the misty speculations of magic, giving them but slight consideration. But towards the end of the Alexandrine period the books ascribed to the half-mythical masters of the Persian science, Zoroaster, Hostanes and Hystaspes, were translated into Greek, and until the end of paganism those names enjoyed a prodigious authority. At the same time the Jews, who were acquainted with the arcana of the Irano-Chaldean doctrines and proceedings, made some of the recipes known wherever the dispersion brought them.^[72] Later, a more immediate influence was exercised upon the Roman world by the Persian colonies of Asia Minor,^[73] who retained an obstinate faith in their ancient national beliefs.

The particular importance attributed to magic by the Mazdeans is a necessary consequence of their dualist system, which has been treated by us before.^[74] Ormuzd, residing in the heavens of light, is opposed by his irreconcilable adversary, Ahriman, ruler of the underworld. The one stands for light, truth, and goodness, the other for darkness, falsehood, and perversity. The one commands the kind spirits which protect the pious believer, the other is master over demons whose malice causes all the evils that afflict humanity. These opposite principles fight for the domination of the earth, and each creates favorable or noxious animals and plants. Everything on earth is either heavenly or infernal. Ahriman and his demons, who surround man to tempt or hurt him,^[75] are evil gods and entirely different from those of which Ormuzd's host consists. The magician sacrifices to them, either to avert evils they threaten, or to direct their ire against enemies of true belief, and the impure spirits rejoice in bloody immolations and delight in the fumes of flesh burning on the altars.^[76] Terrible acts and words attended all immolations. Plutarch^[77] mentions an example of the dark sacrifices of the Mazdeans. "In a mortar," he says, "they pound a certain herb called wild garlic, at the same time invoking Hades (Ahriman), and the powers of darkness, then stirring this herb in the blood of a slaughtered wolf, they take it away and drop it on a spot never reached by the rays of the sun." A necromantic performance indeed.

We can imagine the new strength which such a conception of the universe must have given to magic. It was no longer an incongruous collection of popular superstitions and scientific observations. It became a reversed religion: its nocturnal rites were the dreadful liturgy of the infernal powers. There was no miracle the experienced magician might not expect to perform with the aid of the demons, providing he know how to master them; he would invent any atrocity in his desire to gain the favor of the evil divinities whom crime gratified and suffering pleased. Hence the number of impious practices performed in the dark, practices the horror of which is equaled only by their absurdity: preparing beverages that disturbed the senses and impaired the intellect; mixing subtle poisons extracted from demoniac plants and corpses already in a state of putridity;^[78] immolating children in order to read the future in their quivering entrails or to conjure up ghosts. All the satanic refinement that a perverted imagination in a state of insanity could conceive^[79] pleased the malicious evil spirits; the more odious the monstrosity, the more assured was its efficacy. These abominable practices were sternly suppressed by the Roman government. Whereas, in the case of an astrologer who had committed an open transgression, the law was satisfied with expelling him from Rome—whither he generally soon returned,—the magician was put in the same class with murderers and poisoners, and was subjected to the very severest punishment. He was nailed to the cross or thrown to the wild beasts. Not only the practice of the profession, but even the simple fact of possessing works of sorcery made any one subject to prosecution.^[80]

However, there are ways of reaching an agreement with the police, and in this case custom was stronger than law. The intermittent rigor of imperial edicts had no more power to destroy an inveterate superstition than the Christian polemics had to cure it. It was a recognition of its strength when state and church united to fight it. Neither reached the root of the evil, for they did not deny the reality of the power wielded by the sorcerers. As long as it was admitted that malicious spirits constantly interfered in human affairs, and that there were secret means enabling the operator to dominate those spirits or to share in their power, magic was indestructible. It appealed to too many human passions to remain unheard. If, on the one hand, the desire of penetrating the mysteries of the future, the fear of unknown misfortunes, and hope, always reviving, led the anxious masses to seek a chimerical certainty in astrology, on the other hand, in the case of magic, the blinding charm of the marvelous, the entreaties of love and ambition, the bitter desire for revenge, the fascination of crime, and the intoxication of bloodshed,—all the instincts that are not avowable and that are satisfied in the dark, took turns in practising their seductions. During the entire life of the Roman empire its existence continued, and the very mystery that it was compelled to hide in increased its prestige and almost gave it the authority of a revelation.

A curious occurrence that took place towards the end of the fifth century at Beirut, in Syria, shows how deeply even the strongest intellects of that period believed in the most atrocious practices of magic. One night some students of the famous law-school of that city attempted to kill a slave in the circus, to aid the master in obtaining the favor of a woman who scorned him. Being reported, they had to deliver up their hidden volumes, of which those of Zoroaster and of Hostanes were found, together with those written by the astrologer Manetho. The whole city was agitated, and searches proved that many young men preferred the study of the illicit science to that of Roman law. By order of the bishop a solemn auto-da-fé was made of all this literature, in the presence of the city officials and the clergy, and the most revolting passages were read in public, "in order to acquaint everybody with the conceited and vain promises of the demons," as the pious writer of the story says.^[81]

Thus the ancient traditions of magic continued to live in the Christian Orient after the fall of paganism. They even outlived the domination of the church. The rigorous principles of its monotheism notwithstanding, Islam became infected with those Persian superstitions. In the Occident the evil art resisted persecution and anathemas with the same obstinacy as in the Orient. It remained alive in Rome all through the fifth century,^[82] and when scientific astrology in Europe went down with science itself, the old Mazdean dualism continued to manifest itself, during the entire Middle Ages in the ceremonies of the black mass and the worshiping of Satan, until the dawn of the modern era.

Twin sisters, born of the superstitions of the learned Orient, magic and astrology always remained the hybrid daughters of sacerdotal culture. Their existence was governed by two contrary principles, reason and faith, and they never ceased to fluctuate between these two poles of thought. Both were inspired by a belief in universal sympathy, according to which occult and powerful relations exist between human beings and dead objects, all possessing a mysterious life. The doctrine of sidereal influences, combined with a knowledge of the immutability of the celestial revolutions, caused astrology to formulate the first theory of absolute fatalism, whose decrees might be known beforehand. But, besides this rigorous determinism, it retained its childhood faith in the divine stars, whose favor could be secured and malignity avoided through worship. In astrology the experimental method was reduced to the completing of prognostics based on the supposed character of the stellar gods.

Magic also remained half empirical and half religious. Like our physics, it was based on observation, it proclaimed the constancy of the laws of nature, and sought to conquer the latent energies of the material world in order to bring them under the dominion of man's will. But at the same time it recognized, in the powers that it claimed to conquer, spirits or demons whose protection might be obtained, whose ill-will might be appeased, or whose savage hostility might be unchained by means of immolations and incantations.

All their aberrations notwithstanding, astrology and magic were not entirely fruitless. Their counterfeit learning has been a genuine help to the progress of human knowledge. Because they awakened chimerical hopes and fallacious ambitions in the minds of their adepts, researches were undertaken which undoubtedly would never have been started or persisted in for the sake of a disinterested love of truth. The observations, collected with untiring patience by the Oriental priests, caused the first physical and astronomical discoveries, and, as in the time of the scholastics, the occult sciences led to the exact ones. But when these understood the vanity of the astounding illusions on which astrology and magic had subsisted, they broke up the foundation of the arts to which they owed their birth.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROMAN PAGANISM.

About the time of the Severi the religion of Europe must have presented an aspect of surprising variety. Although dethroned, the old native Italian, Celtic and Iberian divinities were still alive. Though eclipsed by foreign rivals, they lived on in the devotion of the lower classes and in the traditions of the rural districts. For a long time the Roman gods had been established in every town and had received the homage of an official clergy according to pontifical rites. Beside them, however, were installed the representatives of all the Asiatic pantheons, and these received the most fervent adoration from the masses. New powers had arrived from Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and the dazzling Oriental sun outshone the stars of Italy's temperate sky. All forms of paganism were simultaneously received and retained while the exclusive monotheism of the Jews kept its adherents, and Christianity strengthened its churches and fortified its orthodoxy, at the same time giving birth to the baffling vagaries of gnosticism. A hundred different currents carried away hesitating and undecided minds, a hundred contrasting sermons made appeals to the conscience of the people.

Let us suppose that in modern Europe the faithful had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits would be preaching fatalism and predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation—a confusion in which all those priests would erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which the future may perhaps realize, would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine.

The Oriental religions that successively gained popularity exercised a decisive influence on the transformation of Latin paganism. Asia Minor was the first to have its gods accepted by Italy. Since the end of the Punic wars the black stone symbolizing the Great Mother of Pessinus had been established on the Palatine, but only since the reign of Claudius could the Phrygian cult freely develop in all its splendor and excesses. It introduced a sensual, highly-colored and fanatical worship into the grave and somber religion of the Romans. Officially recognized, it attracted and took under its protection other foreign divinities from Anatolia and assimilated them to Cybele and Attis, who thereafter bore the symbols of several deities together. Cappadocian, Jewish, Persian and even Christian influences modified the old rites of Pessinus and filled them with ideas of spiritual purification and eternal redemption by the bloody baptism of the taurobolium. But the priests did not succeed in eliminating the basis of coarse naturism which ancient barbaric tradition had imposed upon them.

Beginning with the second century before our era, the mysteries of Isis and Serapis spread over Italy with the Alexandrian culture whose religious expression they were, and in spite of all persecution established themselves at Rome where Caligula gave them the freedom of the city. They did not bring with them a very advanced theological system, because Egypt never produced anything but a chaotic aggregate of disparate doctrines, nor a very elevated ethics, because the level of its morality—that of the Alexandrian Greeks—rose but slowly from a low stage. But they made Italy, and later the other Latin provinces, familiar with an ancient ritual of incomparable charm that aroused widely different feelings with its splendid processions and liturgic dramas. They also gave their votaries positive assurance of a blissful immortality after death, when they would be united with Serapis and, participating body and soul in his divinity, would live in eternal contemplation of the gods.

At a somewhat later period arrived the numerous and varied Baals of Syria. The great economic movement starting at the beginning of our era which produced the colonization of the Latin world by Syrian slaves and merchants, not only modified the material civilization of Europe, but also its conceptions and beliefs. The Semitic cults entered into successful competition with those of Asia Minor and Egypt. They may not have had so stirring a liturgy, nor have been so thoroughly absorbed in preoccupation with a future life, although they taught an original eschatology, but they did have an infinitely higher idea of divinity. The Chaldean astrology, of which the Syrian priests were enthusiastic disciples, had furnished them with the elements of a scientific theology. It had led them to the notion of a God residing far from the earth above the zone of the stars, a God almighty, universal and eternal. Everything on earth was determined by the revolutions of the heavens according to infinite cycles of years. It had taught them at the same time the worship of the sun, the radiant source of earthly life and human intelligence.

The learned doctrines of the Babylonians had also imposed themselves upon the Persian mysteries of Mithra which considered time identified with heaven as the supreme cause, and deified the stars; but they had superimposed themselves upon the ancient Mazdean creed without destroying it. Thus the essential principles of the religion of Iran, the secular and often successful rival of Greece, penetrated into the Occident under cover of Chaldean wisdom. The Mithra worship, the last and highest manifestation of ancient paganism, had Persian dualism for its fundamental dogma. The world is the scene and the stake of a contest between good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, gods and demons, and from this primary conception of the universe flowed a strong and pure system of ethics. Life is a combat; soldiers under the command of Mithra, invincible heroes of the faith, must ceaselessly oppose the undertakings of the infernal powers which sow corruption broadcast. This imperative ethics was productive of energy and formed the characteristic feature distinguishing Mithraism from all other Oriental cults.

Thus every one of the Levantine countries—and that is what we meant to show in this brief recapitulation—had enriched Roman paganism with new beliefs that were frequently destined to outlive it. What was the result of this confusion of heterogeneous doctrines whose multiplicity was extreme and whose values were very different? How did the barbaric ideas refine themselves and combine with each other when thrown into the fiery crucible of imperial syncretism? In other words, what shape was assumed by ancient idolatry, so impregnated with exotic theories during the fourth century, when it was finally dethroned? It is this point that we should like to indicate briefly as the conclusion to these studies.

However, can we speak of one pagan religion? Did not the blending of the races result in multiplying the variety of disagreements? Had not the confused collision of creeds produced a division into fragments, a communication of churches? Had not a complacent syncretism engendered a multiplication of sects? The "Hellenes," as Themistius told the Emperor Valens, had three hundred ways of conceiving and honoring deity, who takes pleasure in such diversity of homage.^[1] In paganism a cult does not die violently, but after long decay. A new doctrine does not necessarily displace an older one. They may co-exist for a long time as contrary possibilities suggested by the intellect or faith, and all opinions, all practices, seem respectable to paganism. It never has any radical or revolutionary transformations. Undoubtedly, the pagan beliefs of the fourth century or earlier did not have the consistency of a metaphysical system nor the rigor of canons formulated by a council. There is always a considerable difference between the faith of the masses and that of cultured minds, and this difference was bound to be great in an aristocratic empire whose social classes were sharply separated. The devotion of the masses was as unchanging as the depths of the sea; it was not stirred up nor heated by the upper currents.^[2] The peasants practised their pious rites over anointed stones, sacred springs and blossoming trees, as in the past, and continued celebrating their rustic holidays during seed-time and harvest. They adhered with invincible tenacity to their traditional usages. Degraded and lowered to the rank of superstitions, these were destined to persist for centuries under the Christian orthodoxy without exposing it to serious peril, and while they were no longer marked in the liturgic calendars they were still mentioned occasionally in the collections of folk-lore.

At the other extreme of society the philosophers delighted in veiling religion with the frail and brilliant tissue of their speculations. Like the emperor Julian they improvised bold and incongruous interpretations of the myth of the Great Mother, and these interpretations were received and relished by a restricted circle of scholars. But during the fourth century these vagaries of the individual imagination were nothing but arbitrary applications of uncontested principles. During that century there was much less intellectual anarchy than when Lucian had exposed the sects "for sale at public auction"; a comparative harmony arose among the pagans after they joined the opposition. One single school, that of neo-Platonism, ruled all minds. This school not only respected positive religion, as ancient stoicism had done, but venerated it, because it saw there the expression of an old revelation handed down by past generations. It considered the sacred books divinely inspired—the books of Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, the Chaldean oracles, Homer, and especially the esoteric doctrines of the mysteries—and subordinated its theories to their teachings. As there must be no contradiction between all the disparate traditions of different countries and different periods, because all have emanated from one divinity, philosophy, the ancilla theologiae, attempted to reconcile them by the aid of allegory. And thus, by means of compromises between old Oriental ideas and Greco-Latin thought, an ensemble of beliefs slowly took form, the truth of which seemed to have been established by common consent. So when the atrophied parts of the Roman religion had been removed, foreign elements had combined to give it a new vigor and in it themselves became modified. This hidden work of internal decomposition and reconstruction had unconsciously produced a religion very different from the one Augustus had attempted to restore.

However, we would be tempted to believe that there had been no change in the Roman faith, were we to read certain authors that fought idolatry in those days. Saint Augustine, for instance, in his City of God, pleasantly pokes fun at the multitude of Italian gods that presided over the paltriest acts of life.^[3] But the useless, ridiculous deities of the old pontifical litanies no longer existed outside of the books of antiquaries. As a matter of fact, the Christian polemicist's authority in this instance was Varro. The defenders of the church sought weapons against idolatry even in Xenophanes, the first philosopher to oppose Greek polytheism. It has frequently been shown that apologists find it difficult to follow the progress of the doctrines which they oppose, and often their blows fall upon dead men. Moreover, it is a fault common to all scholars, to all imbued with book learning, that they are better acquainted with the opinions of ancient authors than with the sentiments of their contemporaries, and that they prefer to live in the past rather than in the world surrounding them. It was easier to reproduce the objections of the Epicureans and the skeptics against abolished beliefs, than to study the defects of an active organism with a view to criticizing it. In those times the merely formal culture of the schools caused many of the best minds to lose their sense of reality.

The Christian polemics therefore frequently give us an inadequate idea of paganism in its decline. When they complacently insisted upon the immorality of the sacred legends they ignored the fact that the gods and heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence.^[4] The writers of that period, like those of the Renaissance, regarded the fictions of mythology as details necessary to poetical composition. They were ornaments of style, rhetorical devices, but not the expression of a sincere faith. Those old myths had fallen to the lowest degree of disrepute in the theater. The actors of mimes ridiculing Jupiter's gallant adventures did not believe in their reality any more than the author of Faust believed in the compact with Mephistopheles.

So we must not be deceived by the oratorical effects of a rhetorician like Arnobius or by the Ciceronian periods of a Lactantius. In order to ascertain the real status of the beliefs we must refer to Christian authors who were men of letters less than they were men of action, who lived the life of the people and breathed the air of the streets, and who spoke from experience rather than from the treatises of mythmongers. They were high functionaries like Prudentius;^[5] like the man to whom the name "Ambrosiaster"^[6] has been given since the time of Erasmus; like the converted pagan Firmicus Maternus,^[7] who had written a treatise on astrology before opposing "The Error of the Profane Religions"; like certain priests brought into contact with the last adherents of idolatry through their pastoral duties, as for instance the author of the homilies ascribed to St. Maximus of Turin;^[8] finally like the writers of anonymous pamphlets, works prepared for the particular occasion and breathing the ardor of all the passions of the movement.^[9] If this inquiry is based on the obscure indications in regard to their religious convictions left by members of the Roman aristocracy who remained true to the faith of their ancestors, like Macrobius or Symmachus; if it is particularly guided by the exceptionally numerous inscriptions that seem to be the public expression of the last will of expiring paganism, we shall be able to gain a sufficiently precise idea of the condition of the Roman religion at the time of its extinction.

One fact becomes immediately clear from an examination of those documents. The old national religion of Rome was dead.^[10] The great dignitaries still adorned themselves with the titles of augur and quindecimvir, or of consul and tribune, but those archaic prelacies were as devoid of all real influence upon religion as the republican magistracies were powerless in the state. Their fall had been made complete on the day when Aurelian established the pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, the protector of his empire, beside and above the ancient high priests. The only cults still alive were those of the Orient, and against them were directed the efforts of the Christian polemics, who grew more and more bitter in speaking of them. The barbarian gods had taken the place of the defunct immortals in the devotion of the pagans. They alone still had empire over the soul.

With all the other "profane religions," Firmicus Maternus fought those of the four Oriental nations. He connected them with the four elements. The Egyptians were the worshipers of water—the water of the Nile fertilizing their country; the Phrygians of the earth, which was to them the Great Mother of everything; the Syrians and Carthaginians of the air, which they adored under the name of celestial Juno;^[11] the Persians of fire, to which they attributed preeminence over the other three principles. This system certainly was borrowed from the pagan theologians. In the common peril threatening them, those cults, formerly rivals, had become reconciled and regarded themselves as divisions and, so to speak, congregations, of the same church. Each one of them was especially consecrated to one of the elements which in combination form the universe. Their union constituted the pantheistic religion of the deified world.

All the Oriental religions assumed the form of mysteries.^[12] Their dignitaries were at the same time pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, fathers of Mithra, celebrants of the taurobolium of the Great Mother, prophets of Isis; in short, they had all titles imaginable. In their initiation they received the revelation of an esoteric doctrine strengthened by their fervor.^[13] What was the theology they learned? Here also a certain dogmatic homogeneity has established itself.

All writers agree with Firmicus that the pagans worshiped the elementa.^[14] Under this term were included not only the four simple substances which by their opposition and blending caused all phenomena of the visible world,^[15] but also the stars and in general the elements of all celestial and earthly bodies.^[16]

We therefore may in a certain sense speak of the return of paganism to nature worship; but must this transformation be regarded as a retrogression toward a barbarous past, as a relapse to the level of primitive animism? If so, we should be deceived by appearances. Religions do not fall back into infancy as they grow old. The pagans of the fourth century no longer naively considered their gods as capricious genii, as the disordered powers of a confused natural philosophy; they conceived them as cosmic energies whose providential action was regulated in a harmonious system. Faith was no longer instinctive and impulsive, for erudition and reflection had reconstructed the entire theology. In a certain sense it might be said that theology had passed from the fictitious to the metaphysical state, according to the formula of Comte. It was intimately connected with the knowledge of the day, which was cherished by its last votaries with love and pride, as faithful heirs of the ancient wisdom of the Orient and Greece.^[17] In many instances it was nothing but a religious form of the cosmology of the period. This constituted both its strength and its weakness. The rigorous principles of astrology determined its conception of heaven and earth.

The universe was an organism animated by a God, unique, eternal and almighty. Sometimes this God was identified with the destiny that ruled all things, with infinite time that regulated all visible phenomena, and he was worshiped in each subdivision of that endless duration, especially in the months and the seasons.^[18] Sometimes, however, he was compared with a king; he was thought of as a sovereign governing an empire, and the various gods then were the princes and dignitaries interceding with the rulers on behalf of his subjects whom they led in some manner into his presence. This heavenly court had its messengers or "angels" conveying to men the will of the master and reporting again the vows and petitions of his subjects. It was an aristocratic monarchy in heaven as on earth.^[19] A more philosophic conception made the divinity an infinite power impregnating all nature with its overflowing forces. "There is only one God, sole and supreme," wrote Maximus of Madaura about 390, "without beginning or parentage, whose energies, diffused through the world, we invoke under various names, because we are ignorant of his real name. By successively addressing our supplications to his different members we intend to honor him in his entirety. Through the mediation of the subordinate gods the common father both of themselves and of all men is honored in a thousand different ways by mortals who are thus in accord in spite of their discord."^[20]

However, this ineffable God, who comprehensively embraces everything, manifests himself especially in the resplendent brightness of the ethereal sky.^[21] He reveals his power in water and in fire, in the earth, the sea and the blowing of the winds; but his purest, most radiant and most active epiphany is in the stars whose revolutions determine every event and all our actions. Above all he manifests himself in the sun, the motive power of the celestial spheres, the inexhaustible seat of light and life, the creator of all intelligence on earth. Certain philosophers like the senator Praetextatus, one of the dramatis personae of Macrobius, confounded all the ancient divinities of paganism with the sun in a thorough-going syncretism.^[22]

Just as a superficial observation might lead to the belief that the theology of the last pagans had reverted to its origin, so at first sight the transformation of the ritual might appear like a return to savagery. With the adoption of the Oriental mysteries barbarous, cruel and obscene practices were undoubtedly spread, as for instance the masquerading in the guise of animals in the Mithraic initiations, the bloody dances of the galli of the Great Mother and the mutilations of the Syrian priests. Nature worship was originally as "amoral" as nature itself. But an ethereal spiritualism ideally transfigured the coarseness of those primitive customs. Just as the doctrine had become completely impregnated with philosophy and erudition, so the liturgy had become saturated with ethical ideas.

The taurobolium, a disgusting shower-bath of lukewarm blood, had become a means of obtaining a new and eternal life; the ritualistic ablutions were no longer external and material acts, but were supposed to cleanse the soul of its impurities and to restore its original innocence; the sacred repasts imparted an intimate virtue to the soul and furnished sustenance to the spiritual life. While efforts were made to maintain the continuity of tradition, its content had slowly been transformed. The most shocking and licentious fables were metamorphosed into edifying narratives by convenient and subtle interpretations which were a joy to the learned mythographers. Paganism had become a school of morality, the priest a doctor and director of the conscience.^[23]

The purity and holiness imparted by the practice of sacred ceremonies were the indispensable condition for obtaining eternal life.^[24] The mysteries promised a blessed immortality to their initiates, and claimed to reveal to them infallible means of effecting their salvation. According to a generally accepted symbol, the spirit animating man was a spark, detached from the fires shining in the ether; it partook of their divinity and so, it was believed, had descended to the earth to undergo a trial. It could literally be said that