A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries

The lesser mysteries were designed by the ancient theologians, their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the impure soul invested with an earthly body and merged in material nature. In other words, they were intended to signify that such a soul, while in the present life, might be said to die—as far as it is possible for a soul to die—and that upon the dissolution of the present body, if the soul remained in a state of impurity, it would experience a death still more durable and profound.

Indeed, the fact that the soul, until purified by philosophy, suffers death through its union with the body, was obvious to the philologist Macrobius. However, he did not penetrate the secret depth of the ancients, and concluded from this that their descriptions of the infernal abodes signified nothing more than the physical body. But this is clearly absurd, since it is universally agreed that all the ancient theological poets and philosophers taught the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments in the most full and decisive terms, while at the same time occultly intimating that the death of the soul was nothing more than a profound union with the ruinous bonds of the body.