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By Root 5498 0

soul is doomed to continue being reborn, taking on different bodily forms, as humans or as animals, until it has reached the state of `enlightenment' or complete consciousness which can enable it to released into the One. To work towards that state of illumination is the purpose of meditation or yoga, from the Sanskrit word for `union' (from which we also get `yoke, that which `joins together'). In the sixth century BC, there grew up in India the legend of a particular hero, a prince, who managed through his meditation to become so liberated from his lower, individual self, so dedicated to love, selflessness and the light, that midway through life he attained `enlightenment'. He was thus ready to be taken up into heaven and to become immortal, as part of the Universal Soul. But selflessly he remained on earth for another 40 years to spread his teachings as to how this state of perfect light can be achieved. This was the Buddha, who became the central exemplary figure of a whole new religious tradition.

We see a parallel development in sixth century Persia, where the prophet Zoroaster taught that a single spirit of light rules the universe, dispelling the darkness of illusion which shrouds all material existence. In the Mesopotamian civilisation now dominated by the great city of Babylon, the old polytheism had given to a form of monotheism centred on a single supreme spirit, Marduk or Baal, of whom lesser gods were considered to represent particular aspects. In northern Mesopotamia, dominated by the Assyrians, the same tendency centred on their supreme god Ashur. Even in the Mediterranean Greek world, where officially the traditional divinities still held sway, philosophers such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Pythagoras and Parmenides were wrestling intellectually and spiritually with prob lems strikingly similar to those which were being confronted by the religions of the east. How, if all created things are in a permanent state of flux, growth and decay, can we see behind them something which is changeless and eternal? How, since the world consists of a myriad separate entities, can we see that they all ultimately resolve in the One? 12

Meanwhile the new religious impulse of the time was finding its most dramatic expression in the Greek world in the `Orphic mysteries', centred on the cult of the god Dionysus. This son of Zeus had long been part of Greek mythology, associated particularly with the effect of wine to `take men out of themselves, and many stories had been woven around him, not least that of how he had been put to death by the jealousy of the other gods, then brought back to life again, through his father Zeus. But now he had changed his character. He had come to be seen in a new, more serious, more cosmic guise, as if he had been re-conceived as a new and more significant divinity altogether. He aroused in his followers that state of `enthusiasm' or entheosiasmos which literally means `being possessed by the god'. And the key to the power he exercised over them, in the words of the historian Plutarch, was that he was:

`the god who is destroyed, who disappears, who relinquishes life and then is born again.'

Dionysus, in whose honour in fifth century Athens were staged the great religious theatrical festivals which inspired Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to conceive some of the greatest plays ever written, had come to be viewed as a symbol of everlasting life.

`The one true God'

There was one racial group in the ancient world which had seen the universe as ruled by a single divine being long before the others, back into the mists of prehistory. This was that branch of the Semitic peoples living at the eastern end of the Mediterranean who called themselves the `children of Israel: As with all other peoples, the chief way in which they sought to define their identity was through telling stories. And the most important form these took was to rehearse the history of their tribe, generation by generation, back to the beginning: to that moment when the world was called into being by a single Creator-spirit,