Greek Lands and Letters

“That torch-lit strand whereon the Goddesses reverèd foster mystic rites and dread for mortal men whose lips the ministrant Eumolpidæ have locked in golden silence.”

Eleusis, like Delphi, was a centre of Greek religious life, but its Panhellenism was of a later date and a direct consequence of the power of Athens within whose territory it lay. Although the worship of nature’s productivity, under the form of Demeter losing her daughter Persephone within the earth and recovering her again, was indigenous among the early Pelasgic dwellers in Eleusis, and although upon this native cult were grafted religious beliefs and practices imported from Thrace, it is yet true that the Eleusinian Mysteries waxed famous only as Athens waxed great. Once established by the most powerful city of Greece as its highest expression of religious feeling, they drew to their modest birthplace in the recurring Septembers of many centuries the pious and the curious from all Greek lands. The right of initiation, originally open only to citizens of Attica, was extended to all Greeks and later to their Roman conquerors. In this repudiation of “barbarians” Eleusis resembled Olympia rather than Delphi, where Persian or Scyth or African might consult Apollo.

But these three centres of Panhellenic life alike present a history which begins in the dim age of mythology and ends, several centuries after the beginning of our era, in the final clash of Christianity with Paganism. Perhaps the history of Eleusis best deserves the name of “sacred.” Playing no appreciable part in secular events, the town was repeatedly the scene of religious events which were of unequalled spiritual importance. Here an early nature cult, sister to savage rites in many parts of the world, became not only a beautified worship of the physical universe but also an expression of a hope in immortality. “The fable of Kore (the Daughter) is as much the image of the destiny of man after death as it is that of the reproduction of vegetative life by means of the seed committed to the earth.”^[20]

Except for the proximity of Eleusis to Athens there was nothing in the physical qualities of the town to make the Eleusinian mysteries greater than any others. Its loveliness befitted rather than promoted the worship of the Earth Goddesses. Their story clung also to the seaward looking ledges of “steep Cnidos,” where was found the noble statue of Demeter that is now in the British Museum, and to the blossoming fields of Sicilian Enna. The Corn-Mother had her shrines on Bœotian farms and in the mountain caverns of Arcadia, and in more than one locality her worship was as mysterious and secret as the processes of nature. And yet the religious genius of Athens could have had no more exquisite stage than Eleusis for its larger operations. Sheltered by hills, washed by the sea and commanding a goodly plain, it is still, even in its poverty, one of the fairest places in Greece. The Thriasian plain, in the southwestern portion of which, on a low hill, lies the town, is separated from the plain of Athens by the long ridge of Mount Ægaleus and from the plain of Megara by the chain of hills that ends in the twin peaks of the Kerata, or “Horns,” familiar objects in the westward view from the Acropolis of Athens. The mountains of Salamis also seem to contribute to the girdling of Eleusis, so near do they rise across the curving and almost landlocked bay. Empurpled by shadows, the mountains and the sea are like the deep blue robe of the mourning Demeter. Subdued to the delicate and luminous tint of the sky they seem like the veil within whose folds gleamed the cornlike yellow of her hair. Near the sea, close around Eleusis, there are still fertile grain fields to recall that—

The historical development of the Eleusinian mysteries naturally followed the general development of Greek religious thought. To the primitive duality of Demeter and Persephone was added Dionysus, lord of the elements, when he had once been accepted by the Athens of Pisistratus. At Eleusis he appeared as the child Iacchus. Later, under the influences of the strange school of thought known as “Orphic,” at once mystical and gross, this multiple god became Zagreus, through whose savage death man, otherwise destined to be forever brute, came to partake of the divine nature. But in all periods the mysteries “were founded on the adoration of nature, its forces and phenomena, conceived rather than observed, interpreted by the imagination and not by reason, transformed into divine figures and histories by a kind of theological poetry which went off into pantheism on the one side and into anthropomorphism on the other.”

In this theological poetry the position of power was held by the long Homeric Hymn to Demeter, although it antedates the presence of Iacchus at Eleusis and at least overlooks the importance of Triptolemus, the young prince of the city, to whom the Earth-Mother gave the first seed-corn and the commission to teach the art of husbandry throughout the world. The representation of this act was left for fifth century sculpture, if we may so interpret the beautiful relief discovered at Eleusis and preserved in the National Museum. Nor is there more than casual mention of Eumolpus, the legendary first priest and the eponymous ancestor of the priestly family in Athens which was charged with the care of Demeter’s worship. But the Hymn told flawlessly the central story of Demeter and Persephone: the ravishment of Persephone by Hades as she was picking roses and crocuses, violets and irises and the marvelous narcissus which the earth bore to be her snare; the grief of Demeter as she heard the mountain peaks and the deep sea echo her child’s cry, her wandering search, her unrecognised sojourn at fragrant Eleusis in the courteous household of the king, and her retarding of the fruits of the earth; the reunion of mother and daughter for two thirds of the year, and the sending up once more of the grain from the rich fields and the burgeoning of the leaves and flowers; and, finally, the command of the Goddess that the people of Eleusis should build her a great temple and an altar below the town and the steep wall, above the spring Callichorus on the jutting rock.

Homer himself had not known this story. Hesiod had lacked the Ionic gift to tell it. Euripides, in a later generation, was led astray by his strain of Orphic imagination which needed the roar of rivers and the thunder of the sea, the wail of flutes and the clatter of the tambourine to mark the frenzy of a suffering godhead. The Greeks as a people preferred a story in which nature perishes and blooms again, in which grief and love fight with death, while the dignity of life is unassailed, and the beauty of hills and sea, flowers and welling springs irradiates its tragedies.

Only the external facts concerning the celebrations are open to us. The secrets of the two successive initiations, one preparatory to the other, were so jealously hidden by the ancient initiates that the keenest scholarship has not been able to discover them in literature or in art. Alcibiades, idolized as he was, could not secure acquittal from the suspicion of having parodied the mysteries. Silence was enjoined by religion, enforced by law. This reserve about holy things, which has appealed to some moderns as the “chief lesson and culminating grace derived from Eleusis,” was proclaimed not only as a necessary condition but also as an integral part of initiation, “imitating,” as Strabo expressed it, “the nature of the godhead which is forever eluding our senses.” Knowledge of the outward events of the festival has been painstakingly gathered from passages in Athenian literature, a few inscriptions, the excavated ruins, vases and other works of art, and from the controversial literature, both Christian and pagan, of the early centuries of our era.

The “Mysteries” lasted nine days, the time of Demeter’s wanderings. Prior to them the youths—ephebi—of Athens went to Eleusis and brought thence certain sacred objects which were to be used in the later procession. On the 15th of Boedromion, or September, near the time of sowing, the “mystæ,” who in the early spring month of Anthesterion, the season of planting, had participated in the Lesser Mysteries in a suburb of Athens, were assembled at the Stoa Pœcile to listen to sundry proclamations. The following day was one of purification. The cry went out, “seawards, O mystæ,” and every candidate washed himself and his sacrificial pig in the bay near Eleusis, following the Greek feeling that the sea purges from the evils of earth. For two more days sacrifices were carried on at Athens. And then on the 19th or the 20th came the great procession to escort the image of the child Iacchus, myrtle-crowned and carrying in his hand a torch, back to his Eleusinian home. The day was a public holiday. Great crowds gathered along the Sacred Way to watch the long line of ephebi, mystics, priests and officials, who, wearing myrtle and bearing torches, left the Dipylon Gate early in the morning and reached the precinct at Eleusis after nightfall, when the mysterious shadows were dispelled only by the yellow glare of thousands upon thousands of torches and by the lights that streamed from the sacred buildings.

The modern highroad follows very nearly the Sacred Way. Few travellers now brave the heat and dust of an Attic September, but in some “month of flowers” gain their impressions of the beauty of the road, which still leads over the Cephisus, past gray-green olive groves, up through the pine-clad pass of Mount Ægaleus, and down again to wind closely beside the curved shore of the sea. In antiquity the Sacred Way was lined with tombs and temples and shrines. Moderns are detained only by the lovely mediæval Convent of Daphne, at the top of the pass, but the ancient procession lingered not only at the Temple of Apollo which occupied this spot, but at many other sacred stations, to offer sacrifices, sing hymns, and engage in dances, solemn or joyous or wild. This was the reason for leaving Athens so early to cover only thirteen miles before another sunrise. The last part of the way followed the “torchlit strand” by night. The “voices of the night,” the moving feet of the multitude owned Iacchus as lord, with whom the stars also danced, the stars whose breath is fire. And to the stars of Sophocles Euripides added the elemental joy of moon and sea:—

The singing of the vast throngs, breaking out at sunrise, changing its themes in fresh enthusiasms through the long day and swelling by night into triumphant volume, must have been unforgettable. Herodotus relates that in the gloomy time when Athens was abandoned, and its plain laid waste by Xerxes, even a Medizing exile was haunted by its ghostly echoes. Dicæus of Athens chanced to be in the Thriasian plain with Demaratus of Sparta, and saw a cloud of dust advancing from Eleusis, such as a host of thirty thousand men might raise. As he was wondering who the men could possibly be, a sound reached his ear and he thought that he recognised the mystic hymn of Iacchus. Even as they looked, the dust became a cloud and sailed away to Salamis, making for the station of the Grecian fleet. This was a sign to the Athenian that the gods of Eleusis would destroy the fleet of Xerxes. To us an echo of the singing comes through the serious lyrics in the “Frogs” of Aristophanes. At the portals of Hades a band of mystics sing over again the processional hymns they had often sung on earth, beginning with the sunrise summons to Iacchus to leave his Athenian shrine:—

The days at Eleusis were probably only pauses between the “great nights” of the worship of Demeter. The nightly proceedings seem to have consisted of three elements. The first was an imitation of Demeter’s wanderings. The initiates went up and down the shore by the sea, their restless torches appearing from a distance like great “swarms of fireflies.” They sat too upon the Joyless Rock, and by meditation endeavoured to enter into the passion of the Goddess. The second element was some sacrament of food and drink in commemoration of the fact that Demeter was finally persuaded by the merry Iambe to break her fast. Finally came a series of dramatic representations in the great Hall of Initiation, by means of which the divine story was unfolded.

It would be a mistake to suppose that if we knew more details about these celebrations we should understand more clearly the influence that they exerted on the minds and spirits of the celebrants. In the mysteries, we are assured by Aristotle, the initiates did not learn anything precisely, but received impressions, were put into a certain frame of mind for which they had been prepared. The value of subtle influences like these can never be apprehended save by those who have been subjected to them. In no age, under no sanction, have men been able to create sacred rites, whether secret or open, that could not be construed as mummery, not only by those of a different age but even by contemporaries who stood outside the circle of the elect. Were every “secret” of the Eleusinian Mysteries to be recovered, we should still be uninitiated into their higher wisdom. We should still be thrown back, as we are at present, upon a vicarious sympathy with those who have borne witness to the quickening of their spirits in the Eleusinian nights. Fortunately this testimony comes from a few of the most gifted among the Greeks. The often quoted statement of Cicero, that initiation taught men not only to live happily but to die with a fairer hope, only repeats what was said by his literary master, Isocrates: “Those who have participated in the mysteries possess sweeter hopes about death and about the whole of life.” Strangely enough, Æschylus, who was born in Eleusis and whose plays in later times were acted there because of their religious character, seems never to have been initiated. But Pindar and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes harboured personal hopes that those who knew the mysteries were “blessed” in the hour of death and in the life to come. In the “Frogs” the dead mystics end their song in solemn peace:—

The impulse that was derived from Eleusis to lead the earthly life aright must have had as many different results as there were temperaments among the initiates. Andocides, merchant and orator, reminded the Athenian judges that they had contemplated the sacred rites in order that they might punish the guilty and save the innocent. Plato felt that he whose memory of initiation was still fresh and who at Eleusis had been the spectator of “many glories in the other world” must see in every beautiful face or form that he encountered an imitation of divine or absolute beauty toward which his spirit would go out in reverential love.

The excavated remains of ancient Eleusis consist of ground foundations or even fainter traces of buildings and porticoes dating from the “Mycenæan” period to the age of the Antonines. Pisistratus, Cimon, Pericles and Hadrian have left fragmentary records in stone of their interest in this religious centre. The Temple of the Mysteries, which was a great hall rather than a sanctuary, saw many changes in the course of the centuries. The older structure of Pisistratus’s day, destroyed by the Persians, was replaced by Pericles, perhaps according to plans by Ictinus. Left unfinished by him, it was added to by Greek and Roman until its boastful splendour aroused the anger of the Gothic monks who came south with Alaric and compassed its final ruin.

Homelier memories centre in the Spring of Fair Dances (Callichorus), now identified. Here, Pausanias tells us, “the Eleusinian women first danced and sang in honour of the goddess,” decked perhaps like the Doric maidens whose worship of the same goddess charmed the eyes of Alcman:—

A fortunate dream prevented Pausanias from relating to the uninitiated what he saw within the sacred precinct. In unpoisoned content, therefore, lured by the beauty of the “white spring” which Callimachus, the Alexandrian, included among Demeter’s gifts, the modern traveller may sit on the temple steps and abandon thought, even as many an ancient mystic in the autumnal days between the holy nights must have mounted to some place of outlook whence he could watch the deep blue sea break into foam delicate and white as the face of Persephone.

The mysteries ended on the 24th, with a public festival. At Athens games were held, called the Eleusinia, offering as a prize a measure of barley reaped from the field of Rharos close to the walls of Eleusis where the first seed corn had fructified. In later times, with the general increase of holidays, this festival was prolonged, but in the greatest days of Athens the procession of mystics returned to the city on the 25th, with ceremonies of farewell to Persephone now leaving her mother to return to her gloomy lord, like summer nearing the embrace of winter; and with some final ritual, performed, it may be, at the Dipylon Gate rather than at Eleusis, of prayer to sky and earth that the one might impregnate and the other bear. On the curb of a sacred well before the city gate has been found the very ancient formula, not yet outlived by the generations of men who live upon the fruits of the earth.

The day of return gave one last opportunity for a public demonstration—this time of hilarity. Justified by the quips and cranks of Iambe, the initiates yielded to the impulse which in the natural man follows close upon exaltation. At the bridge over the Cephisus the people of the city, wearing masks, met the procession, and a carnival of scurrilous wit ensued, which was a savoury memory to Aristophanes’s mystics in the world of shadows. To us the recollection may bring a sudden distrust of the sympathy with the past which, within the unfretted silence of Eleusis, seemed completely to possess us. Like the spectators in the comedy we get a whiff of pork. The light of the torches reveals the vulgarities of a revelling crowd. The cymbals of the priests, clashed only at this spot, drown the voices “of no tone.” Is it, after all, true, as the early Christians believed, that orgies, not prayers, have busied these men and women?

But with the crossing of the bridge the mood vanishes. The western sun is once more adorning the Athenian Acropolis. Not only Pindar and Plato faced this hill with a new reverence after their Eleusinian nights, but many a simpler man and woman must have come home comforted and hopeful to take up old burdens on the morrow. If, viewed by a Plato from the heights of “true philosophy,” thousands who came from Eleusis were still blind, or only partially aware of the meaning of life and death, this was but the Greek manifestation of a universal fact: “Many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the mystics.”