"The doctrines of mysticism are secret, because they are not cold, abstract beliefs, or articles in a creed, which can be taught and explained by intellectual processes... The 'truth' which mysticism guards is... only... learnt by being experienced (παθεῖν μαθεῖν); it is... not an intellectual, but an emotional experience—that invasive, flooding sense of oneness, of reunion and communion with... the life of the world... Being an emotional, non-rational state, it is indescribable, and incommunicable save by suggestion. To induce that state, by the stimulus of collective excitement and all the pageantry of dramatic ceremonial, is the aim of mystic ritual. The 'truth' can only come to those who submit themselves to these... because it is... to be immediately felt, not conveyed by dogmatic instruction. For that reason only... 'mysteries' are reserved to the initiate, who have undergone 'purification,' ...a state of mind which fits them for the consummate experience. Pythagoreanism presents... an attempt to intellectualise... Orphism, while preserving its social form, and... spirit... Orphism ceases to be a cult, and becomes a Way of life. As a revival, Pythagoreanism means a return to an earlier simplicity... simple enough to adapt itself to a new movement of the spirit. Pythagoreanism is... a complex phenomenon, containing the germs of several tendencies... philosophies that emerged from the school... separating towards divergent issues, or intertwined in ingenious reconciliations. Our analysis must take account of three strata, superimposed... Dionysus, Orpheus, Pythagoras. From Dionysus come the unity of all life, in the cycle of death and rebirth, and the conception of the or collective soul, immanent in the group as a whole, and yet something more than any or all... To Orpheus is due the shift of focus from earth to heaven, the substitution for the vivid, emotional experience of the renewal of life in nature, of the worship of a distant and passionless perfection in the region of light, from which the soul, now immortal, is fallen into the body of this death, and which it aspires to regain by the formal observances of asceticism. But the Orphic still clung to the emotional... reunion and... ritual that induced it, and... to the passionate spectacle (theoria) of the suffering God. Pythagoras gave a new meaning to theoria... as the passionless contemplation of rational, unchanging truth... a 'pursuit of wisdom' (philosophia). The way of life is still also a way of death; but now... death to the emotions and lusts... and a release of the intellect to soar into the untroubled of theory... by which the soul can 'follow God' (ἕπεσθαι θεῷ)... beyond the stars. Orgiastic ritual... drives a... nail into the coffin of the soul, and binds it... to its earthly prison-house. ...[O]only certain ascetic prescriptions of the Orphic askesis are retained, to symbolise a turning away from lower desires, that might enthral... reason."