consequences and necessities under which the really already highly civilized man had to suffer at the beginning of our Christian era. For just as the ancient religious experience was regarded distinctly as a bodily union with the Deity,28 just so was worship permeated with sexuality of every kind. Sexuality lay only too close to the relations of people with each other. The moral degeneracy of the first Christian century produced a moral reaction arising out of the darkness of the lowest strata of society which was expressed in the second and third centuries at its purest in the two antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side, and Mithracism on the other. These religions strove after precisely that higher form of social intercourse symbolic of a projected "become flesh" idea (logos), whereby all those strongest impulsive energies of the archaic man, formerly plunging him from one passion into another,29 and which seemed to the ancients like the compulsion of the evil constellations, as είμαρμένη,[1] and which in the sense of later ages might be translated as the driving force of the libido,30 the δύναμις κινητική[2] of Zeno, could be made use of for social preservation.31
It may be assumed most certainly that the domestication of humanity has cost the greatest sacrifices. An age which produced the stoical ideal must certainly have known why and against what it was created. The age of Nero serves to set off effectually the famous extracts from the forty-first letter of Seneca to Lucilius:
