there had been Rationalism as the religion of educated men, with, above it, the scholar-philosophy and, below it, the "superstition" of the masses. Now, philosophy developed towards an intellectual, and the popular syncretism towards a tangible, religiousness. The tendency was the same in both, and myth-belief and piety spread, not downwards, but upwards. Philosophy had much to receive and little to give. The Stoa had begun in the materialism of the Sophists and Cynics, and had explained the whole mythology on allegorical lines, but the prayer to Zeus at table — one of the most beautiful relics of the Classical Second Religiousness[1] — dates from as early as Cleanthes (d. 232). In Sulla's time there was an upper-class Stoicism that was religious through and through, and a popular syncretism which combined Phrygian, Syrian, and Egyptian cults with numberless Classical mysteries that had become almost forgotten — corresponding exactly to the development of Buddha's enlightened wisdom into Hinayana for the learned and Mahayana for the masses, and to the relation between learned Confucianism and Taoism as the vessel of Chinese syncretism which it soon became.
Contemporary with the "Positivist" Meng-tse (372-289) there suddenly began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism. It has long been a favourite topic of dispute whether this was something new or a recrudescence of old Chinese myth-feeling — but a glance at Hellenism supplies the answer. This syncretism appears "simultaneously" in the Classical, in India and China, and in popular Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines — the Stoa, Lao-tse, Buddha — and carries these through with peasant and springtime and exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 200 B.C. the Classical Syncretism — which must not be confused with that of the later Magian Pseudomorphosis[2] — raked in motives from Orphism, from Egypt, from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism in the popular Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings as charms, and the Buddha-figures as fetishes, was thought to be all the greater for their alien origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse disappeared very quickly. At the beginning of Han times (c. A.D. 200) the troops of the Sen had ceased to be "moral representations" and become kindly beings. The wind-, cloud-, thunder-, and rain-gods came back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out the evil spirits by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time that there arose — doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian philosophy — the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the series of mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos-idea followed a similar line of development.[3]
