In the Passover of the Jews, the borrowed mystery of the Sacrifice God, Osiris (aka Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Mithras), probably survived from the Egyptians; a mystery that goes back to immemorial, prehistoric antiquity – to the "first religion" of all mankind. [813] The Passover lamb is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

Our Pascha is stabbed – Christ. (1 Corinthians 5:7.)

Let us recall the mystery – Plato's myth about the people of the first lost humanity, the Atlanteans. "The ten kings of Atlantis met in the temple of Poseidon, where an orichalcum pillar with the writings of the law was erected... they brought the sacrificial bull to the stake... stabbed ... filled the cup with blood... and every one drank of it,"

. [814]

Everyone drank from it,

, —

as if Mark (14, 23) repeats Plato.

"Demons imitate, μιμησάμενοι. The Eucharist in the sacraments of Mithras, where bread and a cup of water are offered to the initiated, you know... with what words," Justin Martyr is horrified, not quoting the words, probably because they are too similar to the words of the Eucharist he has just quoted. [815] The same "demons" suggested to people that "Dionysus found the vine" and "introduced wine into the Dionysian mysteries." [816] "I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman," Justin must have recalled. "What we call Christianity has always existed, from the beginning of the world to the appearance of Christ in the flesh," teaches Bl. Augustin. If Justin could agree with this, then his horror would perhaps become joy; he would have understood that he had confused the Spirit of God with the "spirit of demons," which, however, was too easy to do, because it is here, on the paths to the Eucharist, that these two Spirits fight, mixing as nowhere else.

XXI

In sacrifices, the most ancient, at least for the memory of mankind (perhaps in the most ancient it was different), man does not yet sacrifice to God at all, but devours him in an animal god or human sacrifice in order to become a god himself. The same thing happens in the later Dionysian mysteries, where "the Maenads, tormenting and devouring their god (the same word τρώγων, as in the sixth chapter of John), hunger to be filled with God, to become 'God-possessed',

Let us recall the testimony of Porphyry about the Dionysian tribe of the Bassars, who lived in the mountain gorges of Thrace, who, in a frenzy of human sacrifices and sacrificial tastes, attacking each other and devouring each other, destroyed themselves without a trace." [817]