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ORIGINAL SOUHCES OF CULTURE. 37most sublime image in human shape, which time 1mssparedus, the Apollo of the Vatican, may be^traccd to the sameorigin.Beside the popular religion,Greece possessed also a religion of the initiated, preserved in the mysteries. Whateverwe may think of these institutions, and whatever idea wemay form of them, no one can doubt that they were religiousones. They must then have necessarily stood in a certainrelation to the religion of the people but we shall;not beable to explain, with any degree of probability,the natureof that relation, until we trace them to their origin.We must preface this inquiry with a general remark. Allthe mysteries of the Greeks, as far as we are acquaintedwith them, were introduced from abroad ;and we can stillpoint out the origin of most of them. Ceres had long wandered over the earth, before she was received at Eleusis, and1erected there her sanctuary- Her secret service in theThesmophoria, according to the account of Herodotus, 2 wasfirst introduced by Danaus, who broughtit from Egypt tothe Peloponnesus. Whether the sacred rites of Orpheusand Bacchus originally belonged to the Thracians or theEgyptians, they certainly came from abroad. Those of theCuretes and the Dactyli had their home in Crete.It has often been said, that these institutions in Greecesuffered, in the progress of time, many and great alterations,that they commonly degenerated, or to speak more correctly,that the Grecians accommodated them to themselves. Itwas not possible for them to preserve among the Greeks thesame character which they had among other nations. Andhere we are induced to ask : What were they originally?How were they introduced and preserved in Greece ? Andwhat relation did they bear to the popular religion?The answer to these questionsis contained in the remarkswhich we have already made on the transformation and appropriation of foreign gods by the Hellenes. Most of thosegods, if not all of them, were received as symbolical, physical beings the ; poets made of them moral agents jandas such they appear in the religion of the people.Isocrat. Paneg. op, p. 46. ed. Steph., and many other places in Meureii1Eleusin. cap.i.2Herod, iv. 1/2.