Seeing these things, greet them thus: 'Hail, the seven Fortunes of heaven, august and good maidens, holy and companions of Minimirrophor, the most holy guardians of the four pillars.'

The rite has a manners system. You do not simply witness the powers of heaven; you greet them, correctly, by rank and title — chaírete, 'hail,' the ordinary Greek hello, addressed to cobra-faced goddesses. To know the right salutation is itself a proof of initiation, the password of the well-brought-up soul, and the whole back half of the Mithras Liturgy is in large part a sequence of such greetings. Their titles fuse two cosmologies without embarrassment. They are Greek Týchai, Fortunes, and Greek parthénoi, maidens 'august and good' — but they are also 'guardians of the four stylískoi,' the four little pillars that, in the old Egyptian picture of the sky, hold the heavens off the earth at the corners of the world. Seven planetary Fortunes keeping the four cosmic pillars: the arithmetic of two religions laid side by side. And at the center a god named only as a sound, minimirrophor, whose 'shared life' (homodíaitoi, literally 'messmates') the maidens keep — divinity imagined as a household that eats together.