Like all the great dramatic revelations of the world, it recounts the soul's adventure in a journey through the dangerous path towards the height of transcendent being and to the fount of origin for life and the soul. This journey was an ascent and a return: the ascent was to the heavens and the soul returned to its place therein: this was the greater content of all myth and prophecy, for prophecy spoke of things true in more worlds than one, things true in Time eternal and not in period alone.

Lack of understanding of the pattern of the heavens as it was regarded by these who were called seers, have made the symbols employed appear to be mere phantasms seen in the troubled waters of the cup of the soul. All the magical rituals and invocations of the gods may be examined, comparative analyses of the mysteries may be undertaken and lead to no just conclusion unless the actual symbols of their mode of speech and its images are regarded from their manner of vision and established for collation. Actually, failure may be laid with justice at the door of that oft-convicted ill-doer, prejudice. No collation of evidence has been possible owing to the lack of discrimination in treatment of the older methods of thought, and to a continual depreciation of their mental capacity: this was in part due to the deliberate assumption that astrology was merely a science (so-called) of prognostication. But Astrology was the science of the stars as it was anciently practised; the judicial aspect, that of prognosis of the future, was a mere offshoot. Unfortunately, since many generations, this has been the sole aspect from which this ancient science has been considered or studied. With occasional and rare exceptions, such as the serious studies by Bouché-Leclercq in French, and F. Boll in German, the root of the belief, that is to be derived from ancient fragmentary comments, and this due in some degree to the antique preference for passing on the tradition of every craft among its practitioners alone by personal participation. The mystery of any occupation was revealed more by a "showing" than by a description or by word of mouth.

All symbols, however true, have, to the person without understanding of their basis of thought, an appearance of being disturbing and phantasmal, or grotesque. The ground of this understanding is the psychological life-the soul's inner activity, which resolves all experience into its own forms and which in return has been moulded and developed into its formal pattern by experience. These antique thinkers regarded the spirit of man to be as old as the universe, descending through the immensities of the heavens into being and life on earth. The paths of the skies had been traversed by it, the garments of its being were made from the planets, the body, the last garment, being the Moon's gift, and this, in the ecstatic release, was the first to be put off.

The separability of the soul is a common tenet of all races of mankind. Man projects his powers into the space about him, of course, by sight in the simple order of appearances, but there have been seers who have brought back strange histories from the world of imagination, the great land of simulacra-that plane of ideas whence, as Plato taught, the origins of all forms we employ with our understanding are stored. The faculty of image making is that which man has employed for his belief and understanding. By symbol, even in its more general form in mathematics, thought is concentrated and directed to a precise mode of application, conditioned by the common experience of human beings relative to quantities. In the use of symbols of a wider order, the same base of common experience is employed, in this case psychological. Yet, though the effect of the symbol in art or religion is appreciated, its conjoint mode of expression, myth, has retained a place in thought by dint of its emotional appeal almost solely. The basic order of thought and feeling to which the myth refers is ignored, at least in so far as it may be presumed to be of importance in man's relation to life.

A symbol is of effect, not by its expression of the physical image, it depends entirely upon its use as a meduim between the world without and that within. It is interpretative and records an order of relationship which is largely independent of the objective reason in the first instance. From associations that are made by thought of a subjective order, are its parts interrelated, and the rational faculty and its views of truth are not paramount in these associations and their selection.

The symbol must be capable of use in every phase and degree of mental experience once its structure is understood. For its understanding in a certain grade no peculiar knowledge is needed, but to attain an assured response of the rational faculty together with the subjective and unconscious mind, it is essential. Exactly like metaphor, however, to the stupid and to those of narrow, overmaterial mind, and habit of thought, it appears futile, But to the mind capable of apprehending association and analogies of an extensive order, it is a guide and director to paths of advancement in such knowledge. Thus the symbol in its religious or mystical aspect is the medium between the exterior physical universe and the interior world of thought: it is a symbol in that it gives a true relation. Detached and not applied as mediate, all such forms are phantasmal and may be differentiated as are vision and hallucination, the one a true summation of its subject, the other of disorder. Symbol is neither a purely external nor a merely personal distortion of fact; it is rather to be regarded as the presentation in true balance or equilibrium of the physical world relative to the psychical.

Objective reason may explain its details and record its associations of thought and image, but to the subjective is its appeal, and from the subjective understanding of the world it is drawn.

The comparative study of the tradition of mankind in myth and revelation has largely neglected to apply its method to comparison of image with image, and symbol with symbol. Philology has usurped the ground and has discussed at length the most dubious word "parallels". Even the psycho-analytical method, with its revival of interest in the mental image and the symbol, yet depends for its measure of philosophy upon philology.

However, as the great visionaries imaged wondrous things and recognised a kindred mode of correspondences amongst themselves, to contemplate their thought is to see the world through their marvellous and resplendent web of metaphor and symbol, and find in its pattern the net which will catch and hold some measure of the glory of the universe that they felt.

To be caught up to heaven to joy and delight in the splendour of being was their experience, and one that they to a degree communicate in their writings. They speak each and all of them of the Way, and if this path is, as they say, marked by symbols which can be found and set in their place it is of no small interest to find and know the way of glory and ecstatic truth. And as their histories are those of being lifted up to the heavens, it is well to look there where they were.