Warburton,[9] in giving a definition of what these Mysteries were, says, “Each of the pagan gods had (besides the public and open) a secret worship paid unto him, to which none were admitted but those who had been selected by preparatory ceremonies, called initiation.  This secret worship was termed the Mysteries.”  I shall now endeavor briefly to trace the connection between these Mysteries and the institution of Freemasonry; and to do so, it will be necessary to enter upon some details of the constitution of those mystic assemblies.

Almost every country of the ancient world had its peculiar Mysteries, dedicated to the occult worship of some especial and favorite god, and to the inculcation of a secret doctrine, very different from that which was taught in the public ceremonial of devotion.  Thus in Persia the Mysteries were dedicated to Mithras, or the Sun; in Egypt, to Isis and Osiris; in Greece, to Demeter; in Samothracia, to the gods Cabiri, the Mighty Ones; in Syria, to Dionysus; while in the more northern nations of Europe, such as Gaul and Britain, the initiations were dedicated to their peculiar deities, and were celebrated under the general name of the Druidical rites.  But no matter where or how instituted, whether ostensibly in honor of the effeminate Adonis, the favorite of Venus, or of the implacable Odin, the Scandinavian god of war and carnage; whether dedicated to Demeter, the type of the earth, or to Mithras, the symbol of all that fructifies that earth,—­the great object and design of the secret instruction were identical in all places, and the Mysteries constituted a school of religion in which the errors and absurdities of polytheism were revealed to the initiated.  The candidate was taught that the multitudinous deities of the popular theology were but hidden symbols of the various attributes of the supreme god,—­a spirit invisible and indivisible,—­and that the soul, as an emanation from his essence, could “never see corruption,” but must, after the death of the body, be raised to an eternal life.[10]

That this was the doctrine and the object of the Mysteries is evident from the concurrent testimony both of those ancient writers who flourished contemporaneously with the practice of them, and of those modern scholars who have devoted themselves to their investigation.

Thus Isocrates, speaking of them in his Panegyric, says, “Those who have been initiated in the Mysteries of Ceres entertain better hopes both as to the end of life and the whole of futurity.” [11]

Epictetus[12] declares that everything in these Mysteries was instituted by the ancients for the instruction and amendment of life.

And Plato[13] says that the design of initiation was to restore the soul to that state of perfection from which it had originally fallen.

Thomas Taylor, the celebrated Platonist, who possessed an unusual acquaintance with the character of these ancient rites, asserts that they “obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul, both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature, and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual vision.” [14]