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THE TREE OF LIFE 97
life, delighting in peace and plenty, bestowing wealth and exuberance
upon his worshippers. Though, in the legend, storm-beaten,
torn and tortured by his persecutors, though the thyrsus-bearing
God flies from his persecuting enemies, he rises once again to new
life and renewed activity. Under the name of Iacchos, the brother
or the bridegroom of Persephone, he had his part with her and
Demeter in the rites of Eleusis. It may be interesting to point out
in passing that Persephone is an attribution of the Kingdom, named
in the Zolzar the Virgin, the Bride of the Son who is in Tiplzaras. It
was this gracious youthful Dionysius, the deity suffering and
transformed, at once evanescent and everlasting, dying and springing
again to a new spiritual life, who was the chief divinity of the
poets and mystics of the sect called Orphic, in whose Mysteries
the soul and its fortunes when released from the body became the
prominent object.
A similar god, expressing the same idea of spiritual equilibrium
and transformation, a god possessing almost identical characteristics
as Dionysius, was Mithra, the Persian God of Light, the light
of the body and the light of the soul. He typified the brilliant
power of the Sun which, unfailingly, conquers day after day and
year after year the powers of darkness and its terrors. Mithra,
commonly worshipped in a cave which, originally perhaps representing
the recess under the earth wherein the Sun at night was
supposed to hide, came to signify to devout worsllippers the abyss
of incarnation into which the soul must descend. Then, like the
god himself, they could arise, purified by many trials and sufferings,
with glory and with exaltation.
The goddess Hathor, together with Aphrodite and Demeter, are
associated with the Sephirah Netsach, Victory. In the earliest
times in Egypt, Hathor was considered as a cosmic goddess, and
she was believed to have been, as the cow-goddess, the personification
of the generative power of Nature which was perpetually
conceiving and creating, bringing forth and maintaining all things.
She was the " mother of her father, and the daughter of her Son,"
which at once recalls the traditional formula of the Tetragrammaton.
There seems to have been no little connection between her
and Isis and Nuit, the queen and personification of space. We
have already described the legend in which Horus killed Isis,
whose head is transformed by Thoth into the head of a cow, the
head of Hathor. This was suggested to imply the evolutionary