Greater deaths win greater portions. (Those who die then become gods.)
Night-walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus and priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.
The mysteries practised among men are unholy mysteries.
And they pray to these images, as if one were to talk with a man's house, knowing not what gods
or heroes are.
For if it were not to Dionysus that they made a procession and sang the shameful phallic hymn,
they would be acting most shamelessly. But Hades is the same as Dionysus in whose honour they
go mad and keep the feast of the wine-vat.
They vainly purify themselves by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped
into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing this, would deem
him mad.
Heraclitus believed fire to be the primordial element, out of which everything else had arisen.
Thales, the reader will remember, thought everything was made of water; Anaximenes thought air
was the primitive element; Heraclitus preferred fire. At last Empedocles suggested a statesmanlike
compromise by allowing four elements, earth, air, fire and water. The chemistry of the ancients
stopped dead at this point. No further progress was made in this science until the Mohammedan
alchemists embarked upon their search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and a method
of transmuting base metals into gold.
The metaphysics of Heraclitus are sufficiently dynamic to satisfy the most hustling of moderns:
"This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now,
and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures kindling and measures going out."
"The transformations of Fire are, first of all, sea; and half of the sea is earth, half whirlwind."
In such a world, perpetual change was to be expected, and perpetual change was what Heraclitus
believed in.
He had, however, another doctrine on which he set even more store than on the perpetual flux; this
was the doctrine of the mingling of opposites. "Men do not know," he says, "how what is at
variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the
lyre." His belief in strife is connected with this