a cave of the sacred mountain Kogaion (, ), which in this myth represents the realm of wild nature, which is also the realm of esoteric knowledge which is the essence of supreme authority. This cave was secluded from the rest of the world except to the king and his attendants, to whom taught the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, according to which neither he nor his companions nor their descendants would ever truly die, but would instead go somewhere where they would attain eternal bliss. At the same time he was preaching, was building a cave as a home for himself, suddenly disappeared from the Thracians, and hid from his tribe in this cave for three years. The Thracians were grieved at 's loss and mourned him as if he were dead, but on the fourth year he gathered his tribe in this cave and appeared to them in a mythical equivalent of a mysterial rite re-enacting his own birth, to initiate the aristocrats of the Getae to his teachings, that is to convince them of the truth of the doctrine of immortality he had taught them. This process of the initiation of the king by Orpheus was recorded in an ancient Greek myth, according to which Midas, the king of the Thracians' Bryges neighbours, listened to the teachings of Orpheus on Mount Piereia. Orpheus/ was therefore a high priest as well as a king and the founder of the institution of the king-high priest. After his departure from the world of humans, this function passed on to the kings, and Orpheus/ himself became an anthropodaemon who uttered prophecies to the kings-high priests, who were the only ones permitted to listen to his counsel. 's building of an underground dwelling is paralleled in Iranian version of the flood myth, where, after the gods decided to cull the Earth's overpopulation, Ahura Mazda instructed Yima to keep samples of all living creatures alive winter by building a cave out of clay. The cave in Thracian religion was a chthonic symbol, and 's cave dwelling itself was connected to the Indo-European conceptualisation of the afterlife as a clay house and to the association of clay with death; 's cave dwelling this again paralleled Yima's abode located far away from starlight, and just like Yima conducted the souls of the dead to a happy abode, promised to the Thracians a paradise