ancient cults in Greece were mystic, others open and public. An explanation often offered is that the mystic cults are the Pelasgic or pre-Hellenic and that the conquered populations desired to shroud their religious ceremonies from the profane eyes of the invaders. But we should then expect to find them administered chiefly by slaves and the lower population; on the contrary they are generally in the hands of the noblest families, and the evidence that slaves possessed in any of them the right of initiation is only slight. Nor does the explanation in other respects fit the facts at all. The deities who are worshipped with mystic rites have in most cases Hellenic names and do not all belong to the earliest stratum of Hellenic religion. Besides those of Demeter, by far the most numerous in the Hellenic world, we have record of the mysteries of Ge at Phlye in Attica, of Aglauros and the Charities at Athens, of Hecate at Aegina; a shrine of Artemis Muoia on the road between Sparta and Arcadia points to a mystic cult of this goddess, and we can infer the existence of a similar worship of Themis. Now these are either various forms of the earth-goddess, or are related closely to her, being powers that we call "chthonian," associated with the world below, the realm of the dead. We may surmise then that the mystic setting of a cult arose in many cases from the dread of the religious miasma which emanated from the nether world and which suggested a prior ritual of purification as necessary to safeguard the person before approaching the holy presence or handling certain holy objects. This would explain the necessity of mysteries in the worship of Dionysus also, the Cretan Zagreus, Trophonius at Lebadeia, Palaemon-Melicertes on the Isthmus of Corinth. They might also be necessary for those who desired communion with the deified ancestor or hero, and thus we hear of the mysteries of Dryops at Asine, of Antinous the favourite of Hadrian at Mantineia. Again, where there was hope or promise that the mortal should by communion be able to attain temporarily to divinity, so hazardous an experiment would be safeguarded by special preparation, secrecy and mystic ritual; and this may have been the prime motive of the institution of the Attis-Cybele mystery.. (See GREAT MOTHER OF THE GODS.)

For the student of Hellenism, the Eleusinian and Orphic ceremonies are of paramount importance; the Samothracian, which vied with these in attractiveness for the later Hellenic world, were not Hellenic in origin, nor wholly hellenized in character, and cannot be considered in an article of this compass. As regards the Eleusinia, we are in a better position for the investigation of them than our predecessors were; for the modern methods of comparative religion and anthropology have at least taught us to ask the right questions and to apply relevant hypotheses; archaeology, the study of vases, excavations on the site, yielding an ever-increasing hoard of inscriptions, have taught us much concerning the external organization of the mysteries, and have shown us the beautiful figures of the deities as they appeared to the eye or to the mental vision of the initiated.

As regards the inner content, the secret of the mystic celebration, it is in the highest degree unlikely that Greek inscriptions or art would ever reveal it; the Eleusinian scenes that appear on Attic vases of about the 5th century cannot be supposed to show us the heart of the mystery, for such sacrilegious rashness would be dangerous for the vase-painter. If we are to discover it, we must turn to the ancient literary records. These must be handled with extreme caution and a more careful scrutiny than is often applied. We must not expect full enlightenment from the Pagan writers, who convey to us indeed the poetry and the glow of this fascinating ritual, and who attest the deep and purifying influence that it exercised upon the religious temperament, but who are not likely to tell us more. It is to the Christian Fathers we must turn for more esoteric knowledge, for they would be withheld by no scruple from revealing what they knew. But we cannot always believe that they knew much, for only those who, like Clement and Arnobius, had been Pagans in their youth, could ever have been initiated. Many of them uncritically confuse in the same context and in one sweeping verdict

| of condemnation Orphic, Phrygian-Sabazian and Attis-Mysteries with the Eleusinian; and we ought not too lightly to infer that these were actually confused and blended at Eleusis. We must also be on our guard against supposing that when Pagan or Christian writers refer vaguely to "mysteria," they always have the Eleusinian in their mind.

The questions that the critical analysis of all the evidence may hope to solve are mainly these: (a) What do we know or what can we infer concerning the personality of the deities to whom the Eleusinian mysteries were originally consecrated, and were new figures admitted at a later period? (b) When was the mystery taken over by Athens and opened to all Hellas, and what was the state-organization provided? (c) What was the inner significance, essential content or purport of the Eleusinia, and what was the source of their great influence on Hellas? (d) Can we attribute any ethical value to them, and did they strongly impress the popular belief in immortality? Limits of space allow us only to adumbrate the results that research on the lines of these questions has hitherto yielded.

The paramount divine personalities of the mystery were in the earliest period of which we have literary record, the mother and the daughter, Demeter and Kore, the latter being never styled Persephone in the official language of Eleusis; while the third figure, the god of the lower world known by the euphemistic names of Pluto (Plouton) and at one time Eubouleus, the ravisher and the husband, is an accessory personage, comparatively in the background. This is the conclusion naturally drawn from the Homeric hymn to Demeter, a composition of great ritualistic value, probably of the 7th century B.C., which describes the abduction of the daughter, the sorrow and search of the mother, her sitting by the sacred well, the drinking of the KUKEά or sacred cup and the legend of the pomegranate. An ancient hymn of Pamphos, from which Pausanias freely quotes and which he regards as genuine,' appears to have told much the same story in much the same way. As far as we can say, then, the mother and daughter were there in possession at the very beginning. The other pair of divinities known as d Oeós ǹ Oeá, that appear in a 5th-century inscription and on two dedicatory reliefs found at Eleusis, have been supposed to descend from an aboriginal period of Eleusinian religion when deities were nameless, and when a peaceful pair of earth-divinities, male and female, were worshipped by the rustic community, before the earth-goddess had pluralized herself as Demeter and Kore, and before the story of the madre dolorosa and the lost daughter had arisen.2 But for various reasons the contrary view is more probable, that ó beos and ǹ eá àre later cult-titles of the married pair Pluto-Cora (Plouton-Kore), the personal names being omitted from that feeling of reverential shyness which was specially timid in regard to the sacred names of the deities of the underworld. And it is a fairly familiar phenomenon in Greek religion that two separate titles of the same divinity engender two distinct cults.

The question as to the part played by Dionysus in the Eleusinia is important. Some scholars, like M. Foucart, have supposed that he belonged from the beginning to the inner circle of the mystery; others that he forced his way in at a somewhat later period owing to the great influence of the Orphic sects who captured the stronghold of Attic religion and engrafted the Orphic-Sabazian iepòs Xoyos, the story of the incestuous union of Dionysus-Sabazius with Demeter-Kore, and of the death and rendering of Zagreus, upon the primitive Eleusinian faith. A saner and more careful criticism rejects this view. There is no genuine trace discovered as yet in the inner circle of the mysteries of any characteristically Orphic doctrine; the names of Zagreus and Phanes are nowhere heard, the legend of Zagreus and the death of Dionysus are not known to have been mentioned there. Nor is there any print within or in the precincts of the TeλEσTηplov: the hall of the Moral, of the footsteps of the Phrygian deities, Cybele, Attis, Sabazius. i. 38, 3: i. 39, I.

Ephem. archaiol. (1886), iv. 3; Heberdey in Festschrift für Benndorf, See Dittenberger, Sylloge, 13; Corp. inscr. att. 2, 1620 c, 3, 1109; p. 3, Taf. 4; Von Prott in Athen. Mittheil. (1899), p. 262.

The exact relation of Dionysus to the mysteries involves the question as to the divine personage called Iacchus; who and what was Iacchus? Strabo (p. 468), who is a poor authority on such matters, describes him as "the daemon of Demeter, the founder of the leader of the mysteries." More important is it to note that "Iacchus" is unknown to the author of the Homeric hymn, and that the first literary notice of him occurs in the well-known passage of Herodotus (viii. 65), who describes the procession of the mystae as moving along the sacred way from Athens to Eleusis and as raising the cry "lakxe. We find Iacchus the theme of a glowing invocation in an Aristophanic Ode (Frogs, 324-398), and described as a beautiful " young god "; but he is first explicitly identified with Dionysus in the beautiful ode of Sophocles' Antigone (1119); and that this was in accord with the popular ritualistic lore is proved by the statement of the scholiast on Aristophanes (Frogs, 482) that the people at the Lenaea, the winter-festival of Dionysus, responded to the command of "Invoke the god!" with the invocation "Hail, Iacchus, son of Semele, thou giver of wealth!" We are sure, then, that in the high tide of the Attic religious history Iacchus was the youthful Dionysus, a name of the great god peculiar to Attic cult; and this is all that here concerns us to know.

We can now answer the question raised above. This youthful Attic Dionysus has his home at Athens; he accompanies his votaries along the sacred way, filling their souls with the exaltation and ecstasy of the Dionysiac spirit; but at Eleusis he had no temple, altar or abiding home; he comes as a visitor and departs. His image may have been carried into the Hall of the Mysterics, but whether it played any part there in a passion-play we do not know. That he was a primary figure of the essential mystery is hard to believe, for we find no traces of his name in the other Greek communitics that at an early period had instituted mysteries on the Eleusinian model. Apart from Iacchus, Dionysus in his own name was powerful enough at Eleusis as in most other localities. And the votaries carried with them no doubt into the hall the Bacchic exaltation of the Iacchus procession and the nightly revel with the god that preceded the full initiation; many of them also may have belonged to the private Dionysiac sects and might be tempted to read a Dionysiac significance into much that was presented to them. But all this is conjecture. The interpretation of what was shown would naturally change somewhat with the changing sentiment of the ages; but the mother and the daughter, the stately and beautiful figures presented to us by the author of the homeric hymn, who says no word of Dionysus, are still found reigning paramount and supreme at Eleusis just before the Gothic invasion in the latter days of Paganism. Triptolemus the apostle of cornculture, Eubouleus-originally a euphemistic name of the god of the under-world, "the giver of good counsel," conveying a hint of his oracular functions-these are accessory figures of Eleusinian cult and mythology that may have played some part in the great mystic drama that was enacted in the hall.

The development and organization of the Eleusinia may now be briefly sketched. The legends concerning the initiation of Heracles and the Dioscuri preserve the record of the time when the mysteries were closed against all strangers, and were the privilege of the Eleusinians alone. Now the Homeric hymn in its obvious appeal to the whole of the Greek world to avail themselves of these mysteries gives us to suppose that they had already been thrown open to Hellas; and this momentous change, abolishing the old gentile barriers, may have naturally coincided with, or have resulted from, the fusion of Eleusis and Athens, an event of equal importance for politics and religion which we may place in the prehistoric period. The reign of Peisistratus was an era of architectural activity at Eleusis; but the construction of the μUOTIKOS ONKOS was one of the achievements of the Periclean administration. Two inscriptions, containing decrees passed during the supremacy of Pericles, the one proclaiming a holy truce of three months for the votaries that came from any Greek community,' the other bidding the subject allies and inviting the independent states to send Corp. inscr. att. i. 1.

ȧnapxai or tithe-offerings of corn to Eleusis, record the farsighted policy of Periclean Athens, her determination to find a religious support for her hegemony.

At least from the 5th century onwards, the external control and all questions of the organization of the mysteries were in the hands of the Athenian state, the rule holding in Attica as elsewhere in Hellas that the state was supreme over the Church. The head of the general management was the king-archon (archon-basileus) who with his paredros and the four "epimeletai" formed a general committee of supervision, and matters of importance connected with the ritual were decided by the Boulé or Ecclesia. But the claim of Eleusis as the religious metropolis was not ignored. The chief of the two priestly families, in whose hands lay the mystic celebration itself and the formal right of admission, was the Eleusinian "gens" of the Eumolpidae; it was to their ancestor that Demeter had entrusted her öpyla, and the recognition of their claims maintained the principle of apostolic succession. To them belonged the hierophant (iɛpopávτŋs), the high priest of the Eleusinia, whose function alone it was to "reveal the orgies," to show the sacred things, and who alone or perhaps with his consort-priestess-could penetrate into the innermost shrine in the hall; an impressive figure, so sacred in person that no one could address him by his personal name, and bound, at one period at least, by a rule of celibacy. We hear also of two "hierophantides," female attendants on the older and younger goddesses. In fact, while the male priest predominates in this ritual, the women play a prominent part: as we should expect, considering that the sister-festival of the Thesmophoria was wholly in their hands. The other old priestly family was that of the "Kerykes," to whom the dadouxos belonged, "the holder of the torch," the official second in rank to the lepopávrns. It is uncertain whether this family was of Eleusinian origin; and in the 4th century it seems to have died out, and the office of the dadouxos passed into the hands of the Lycomidae, a priestly family of Phlye, suspected of being devotees of Orphism.

Turning now to the celebration itself, we can only sketch the more salient features here. On the 13th of Boedromion, the Attic month corresponding roughly to our September, the Ephebi (q.v.) marched out to Eleusis, and returned to Athens the next day bringing with them the 'holy things (iepá) to the "Eleusinion " in the city; these lepá probably included small images of the goddesses. The 16th was the day of the ȧyupμós, the gathering of the catechumens, when they met to hear the address of the hierophant, called the poppηois. This was no sermon, but a proclamation bidding those who were disqualified or for some reason unworthy of initiation to depart. The legally qualified were all Hellenes and subsequently all Romans above a certain-very youthful-limit of age, women, and as it appears even slaves; barbarians, and those uncleansed of some notorious guilt, such as homicide, were disqualified. We are sure that there was no dogmatic test, nor would time allow of any searching moral scrutiny, and only the Samothracian rites, in this respect unique in the world of classical religion, possessed a system of confessional. The hierophant appealed to the conscience of the multitude; but we are not altogether sure of the terms of his proclamation, which can only be approximately restored from late Pagan and early Christian writers. We know that he demanded of each candidate that he should be intelligible speech (i.e. an Hellene) and pure of hand "; and he catechized him as to his condition of ritualistic purity-the food he had eaten or abstained from. It appears also from Libanius that in the later period at least he solemnly proclaimed that the catechumen should be " pure of soul," and this spiritual conception of holiness had arisen already in the earlier periods of Greek religious thought. On the other hand we must bear in mind the criticism that Diogenes is said to have passed upon the Eleusinia, that many bad characters were admitted to communion, thereby securing a promise of higher happiness than an uninitiated Epaminondas could aspire to. An essential preliminary was purification and lustration, and 2 Dittenberger, Sylloge, 13. 'Or. Corinth, iv. 356.

of

"

The question of supreme interest now arises: What was the mystic ceremony in the hall? what was said and what was done? We can distinguish two grades in the celebration; the greater was the reλea and éжожTiкά, the full and satisfying celebration, to which only those were admitted who had passed the lesser stage at least a year before. As regards the actual ritual in the hall of the mystae, much remains uncertain in spite of the unwearying efforts of many generations of scholars to construct a reasonable statement out of fragments of often doubtful evidence. We are certain at least that something was acted there in a religious drama or passion-play, the revelation was partly a pageant of holy figures; the accusations against Aeschylus. and Alcibiades would suffice to prove this; and Porphyry speaks of the hierophant and the dadoûxos acting divine parts. What the subject of this drama was may be gathered partly from the words of Clement-" Deo (Demeter) and Kore became the personages of a mystic drama, and Eleusis with its dadouxos celebrates the wandering, the abduction and the sorrow (Protrept., p. 12 Potter), partly from Psyche's appeal to Demeter in Apuleius (Metamorph. 6)—" by the unspoken secrets of the mystic chests, the winged chariots of thy dragon-ministers, the bridal descent of Proserpine. [Persephone], the torch-lit wanderings to find thy daughter and all the other mysteries that the shrine of Attic Eleusis shrouds in secret." We may believe then that the great myth of the mother's sorrow, the loss and the partial recovery of her beloved was part of the Eleusinian passion-play. Did it also include a lepòs yaμos? We should naturally expect that the sacred story acted in the mystic pageant would close with the scene of reconciliation, such as a holy marriage of the god and the goddess. But the evidence that this was so is mainly indirect, apart from a doubtful passage in Asterius, a writer of questionable authority in the 4th century A.D. (Econom. martyr. p. 194, Combe). At any rate, if a holy marriage formed part of the passion-play, it may well have been acted with solemnity and delicacy. We have no reason to believe that even to a modern taste any part of the ritual would appear coarse or obscene; even Clement, who brings a vague charge of obscenity against all mysteries in general, does not try to substantiate it in regard to the Eleusinia, and we hear from another Christian writer of the scrupulous purity of the hierophant.

It would be interesting to know if the birth of a holy child, a babe Iacchus, for example, was a motive of the mystic drama. The question seems at first sight to be decided by a definite statement of Hippolytus (Philosoph. 5, 8), that at a certain moment in the mysteries the hierophant cried aloud: "The ladygoddess Brimo has borne Brimos the holy child." But a careful consideration of the context almost destroys the value of his authority. For he does not pretend to be a first-hand witness, but admits that he is drawing from Gnostic sources, and he goes on at once to speak of Attis and his self-mutilation. The formula may then refer to the Sabazian-Phrygian mystery, which the Gnostics with their usual spirit of religious syncretism would have no scruple in identifying with the Eleusinian. And the

no item for scenic expenses or painting. We are led to suppose that the pageant-play produced its effect by means of gorgeous raiment, torches and stately figures.

But the mystic action included more than the pageant-play. The hierophant revealed certain holy objects to the eyes of the assembly. There is reason to suppose that these included certain primitive idols of the goddesses of immemorial sanctity; and, if we accept a statement of Hippolytus (loc. cit.) we must believe that the epoptae were also shown" that great and marvellous mystery of perfect revelation, a cut corn-stalk." The value of this definite assertion, which appears to be an explicit revelation of the secret, would be very great, if we could trust it; but unfortunately it occurs in the same suspicious context as the Brimo-Brimos formula, and we again suspect the same uncritical confusion of Eleusinian with Phrygian ritual, for we know that Attis himself was identified in his mysteries with the "reaped corn," the orάxus ăμnτos, almost the very phrase used by Hippolytus. Only, it is in the highest degree probable, whether Hippolytus knew anything or not, that a corn-token was shown among the sacred things of a mystery which possessed an original agrarian significance and was intended partly to consecrate and to foster the agricultural life. But to say this is by no means the same as to admit the view of Lenormant1 and Dr Jevons2 that the Eleusinians worshipped the actual corn, or revered it as a clan-totem. For of direct corn-worship or of corn-totemism there is no trace either at Eleusis or elsewhere in Greece. Among the δρώμενα οι

things done" may we also include a solemn sacrament, the colebration of a holy communion, in which the votary was united to the divinity by partaking of some holy food or drink? We owe to Clement of Alexandria (Protrept. p. 18, Potter) an exact transcription of the pass-word of the Eleusinian mystae; it ran as follows (if we accept Lobeck's emendation of yyevoáμevos for ¿pyacáμevos): “I have fasted, I have drunk the barley-drink, I have taken [the things] from the sacred chest, having tasted thereof I have placed them into the basket and again from the basket into the chest.” We gather from this that some kind of sacrament was at least a preliminary condition of initiation; the mystae drank of the same cup as the goddess drank in her sorrow, partly-as we say—" in memory of her," partly to unite themselves more closely with her. We know also from an inscription that the priest of the Samothracian mysteries broke sacred bread and poured out drink for the mystae (Arch. epigr. Mitth. 1882, p. 8, No. 14). But neither in these nor in the Eleusinian is there any trace of the more mystic sacramental conception, any indication that the votaries believed themselves to be partaking of the actual body of their divinity; for there is no evidence that Demeter was identified with the corn, still less with the barley-meal of which the KUKEw was compounded. Nor is it likely that the sacrament was the pivot of the whole mystery or was part of the essential act of the pinois itself. In the first place we have an almost certain representation of the Eleusinian sacrament on an archaic vase in Naples, probably of Attic provenance, and the artistic reproduction of a holy act would have been impious and dangerous, if this had belonged to the inner circle of the mystery. Again, there is no mention of sacrament or sacrifice among the five essential parts of uinois given by. Theo 1 Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire, 1, p. 1066. Introduction to the Study of Religion.

This is Dr Jevons's supposition-op. cit-on which he bases an important theory of the whole Eleusinian mysterics and their intrinsic attraction.

Farnell, Cults. vol. iii. pl. xv*.