But if you wish to make use of a fellow-initiate as well, so that he alone may hear with you what is said, let him purify himself with you for seven days, and abstain from animal food and from the bath.

The secret can be shared, but only sideways, and only with one already inside. The partner must be a symmýstēs — a 'fellow-initiate,' someone who has been through the mysteries himself; the word draws the exact boundary of who may be in the room. This is how mystery religion always worked: not a faith you profess but a circle you are admitted to, whose contents the admitted keep from everyone else. The verb for their shared preparation, synagneúō, means to keep ritual purity together — purity as a joint undertaking. The two abstentions are precise and revealing. No émpsycha — nothing 'ensouled,' i.e. no animal flesh — the standard purity of priests and Pythagoreans, on the logic that to meet the divine you must not be full of dead life. And no balaneîon, no bath: the daily visit to the baths was the great ordinary pleasure of Roman life, so forgoing it marks the seven days as set apart, uncomfortable, deliberately outside the normal round. Purity here is not cleanliness; it is subtraction — of meat, of comfort — until the body is spare enough for a god.