And you at once [give] a long bellow, straining the belly so as to rouse the five senses all at once, long, to the point of exhaustion; bellow, kissing the amulets again and saying: 'mokrimo pherimo phereri, my Life (Zōē), of me N.N., remain, you,

The rite has a theory of the body, and it surfaces here. You bellow again, straining the gastḗr, 'so as to synkinḗsēis the five aisthḗseis' — to jolt all five senses awake at once. The fivefold scheme of the senses is Aristotle's; aísthēsis is the philosophers' word for perception itself, the channel between soul and world. So this is a deliberate physiology of ecstasy: force the breath, and every channel of perception flies open together at the instant of the god, so the whole self receives the vision at full intensity. And at that pitch, something in the initiate panics. He calls out to his own Zōḗ — 'my Life' — as to a separate being: 'remain, you… do not leave me.' Greek keeps zōḗ, sheer aliveness, apart from bíos, a life's story; and here that aliveness is treated as a guest that might depart. It makes sense of the terror: he is about to be 'born again' by dying, and the one thing he cannot afford to lose in the crossing is the life-force itself. So he names it and begs it to stay. The immortality rite's most frightened line is a man talking to his own life.