The similitude of death with sleep is an idea of ancient date and of wide distribution, which for many of mankind, whatever be the creed professed, has mitigated the fears or lightened the uncertainties which attach to the cessation of this life. Adopted by the founder of the Christian religion as an illustration of the doctrine that men ‘shall rise again with their bodies,’ the thought has become a part of the heritage of Christendom, and in our own language the word ‘cemetery’ bears testimony to it. But the idea had been evolved by pagan thought long centuries before the dawn of Christianity, and probably enough by the thinkers and poets of many nations independently one of another. In the oldest literature of Greece we meet with the thought already fully developed and evidently familiar. ‘To sleep an iron slumber[1358]’ is already in Homeric language a simple and natural synonym for ‘to die’; and so too we are told that in the far off golden age men ‘died as it were overborne by sleep[1359].’ And in yet plainer terms, where Death and Sleep are personified, they are spoken of as twin brethren[1360], the children of Night[1361]. This conception seems too to have been a favourite in art[1362], and provided one of the scenes on the renowned chest of Cypselus[1363].

When we turn to the folk-songs of the present day, we cannot of course hope to find the imagery of Death and Sleep pourtrayed as infants sleeping in the lap of Night, nor indeed, so far as I know, are they even described as brothers; for the personification of them by the modern peasants is rare. But the old resemblance between them is still recognised, and, quite apart from Christian influence, the thought finds natural expression in those largely pagan improvisations of mourning in which the name of Charon is to be heard more frequently than the name of God. It will suffice to quote but one stanza from one of the most simple and touching of these funeral-songs:

Now this idea, born in some long-forgotten pagan age, fostered by Homer and Hesiod and no less tenderly by the Christian Church, familiar to every Greek mind for full three thousand years, harmonizes well with the belief that body as well as soul survives death. Beyond the superficial resemblance in the inert figures of the dead man laid out for burial and of one who sleeps soundly, there was another and profounder resemblance in the manner of their waking to fresh activity, the one in this world, the other in the under-world. Homer, with his belief that the soul alone, survives, notes only the first resemblance. The twofold property of laying men to sleep and of raising them therefrom resided fitly in the wand of Hermes the escorter of the dead; but though he escorted men’s souls to the house of Hades and might at will summon their souls thence[1365], there is no suggestion of a bodily awakening from the sleep of death. But Virgil, even in his close imitation of Homer, adds to the Homeric description of Hermes’ wand one phrase of his own. ‘Therewith doth he summon forth from Orcus the pale spirits of the dead, and others doth he send down to gloomy Tartarus; therewith he giveth sleep and taketh it away’—so far does Virgil follow Homer, but he adds—‘and unsealeth men’s eyes from death[1366].’ The Homeric picture is enriched by a new thought, foreign to the Achaean religion but proper to that other belief which inspired Pindar’s description of the future life, the thought that after death and dissolution, men’s eyes should open upon a brighter world and a life of renewed bodily activity.

Such was the thought with which the pagans of ancient Greece had comforted themselves long before Christianity availed itself of the same imagery. But the Hellenic religion went yet further, and found in this thought not only peace and contentment but vivid joy. The sleep of death was the means whereby men should attain to closer communion with their gods. The grave was a bed, but a bed of delight rather than of rest, a bridal bed. They should not sleep alone, but in the very embrace of the gods to whom in this life they had striven to draw nigh. The darkness of the tomb was but the wedding-night. Full union in the other world should be the consummation of partial communion in this. The marriage of men with their gods was the ideal to which Greek piety dared aspire.

Such an ideal may well seem bold even to the verge of impious presumption. But Greek religion, even in its highest developments, was the natural and spontaneous expression of the beliefs and hopes of a whole people; it differed from all the great religions of the modern world in having no founder. Great teachers no doubt arose, as Orpheus or Pythagoras, who influenced the course of religious thought; but they were not the founders of new religions. The old self-grown faiths of the people were the stocks upon which they grafted, as it would seem, even their new doctrines; they founded schools indeed, but schools which did not sever themselves from the received religion and become sects. The Orphic mysteries differed so little from the old Pelasgian mysteries of Eleusis that Orpheus was sometimes even reputed to be their founder too; yet, as we shall see, the Eleusinian rites were merely one presentment of a conception common to the whole Greek people. If then this ideal of marriage between men and gods in the future life was no invented or imported doctrine, but simply the highest development of purely popular aspirations towards close communion with the gods, its audacity is less surprising. From time immemorial down to this day[1367] Greece has had its popular stories of nuptial union even in this life between gods and mortal women, between goddesses and mortal men; and educated Greeks, who could not credit such occurrences in their own times, might well believe that a joy, which had been granted to the brave men and fair women of a former and better age even during their life-time upon earth, was still reserved for the righteous in the world to come. Pausanias tells us with a wonderful simplicity that in his time owing to the increase of iniquity in all the world no one was changed from a man into a god, and that the wrath of the gods against the unrighteous was laid up against the time when they should quit this earth[1368]. If then there was believed to be a postponement of punishment for those who offended the gods, there might well be a reservation of blessedness for those who pleased them. It would have imposed no strain upon the faith of such as Pausanias to look forward to the enjoyment in a future life of the same bliss as had been enjoyed in old time upon earth by men ‘who by reason of their uprightness and piety sat at the same hospitable board as gods, and whom the gods openly visited with honour for their goodness even as they visited the wicked with their displeasure[1369],’ men who, as many an old legend told, had shared not the board only but even the bed of deities.

This curious Greek conception of death as a form of marriage was first borne in upon me by the funeral-dirges of the modern peasants. Examples may be found in any collection of Greek folk-songs. The actual expression of the thought varies considerably, but it would probably be hard to find in Greece any professional mourner in whose elaborations the idea did not occupy an important place. It is utilised with equal frequency in regard to persons of either sex, whether married or unmarried at the time of death. The two following specimens from Passow’s collection are fairly representative.

Here evidently we have the funeral-dirge of an old man, and, as is usual in these poems, a large part of the words are put into his mouth. In this fragment the first two lines are the dead man’s complaint, the next two are an answer returned to him, and then again he takes up his parable. The second example which I will give is from a lamentation for a young girl. The first few lines are addressed by the father and mother to their dead child, and with a quaint directness contrast the gloom of the lower world with the simple joys of a peasant’s life here above; while the last three lines are an answer put into the dead girl’s mouth.

In this dirge, it may be noticed, there is no complaint on the part of the dead girl; the lamentation and the gloomy description of Hades are assigned to her parents. And indeed her reply is, I think, intended to be by way of consolation. It is true that she does not deny their cheerless prognostications nor attempt to paint a brighter picture of the nether world, but she represents her death as no greater breaking of old ties than is marriage; at an actual marriage indeed the same kind of distressful presages are chanted by the girl’s companions, and even the bride herself is bound by propriety to exhibit a sullen and regretful demeanour. Very true of Greek marriages and of Greek funerals is the proverb, μηδ’ ἀπὸ τὴ λύπη λείπουν γέλια μηδ’ ἀπὸ τὴ χαρὰ τὰ κλάμματα[1372], ‘Mourning hath its mirth and joy its tears.’ But the consolatory tone is far more pronounced in some other passages from the same collection. A good example is found in the message which a Klepht—one of those patriot-outlaws who struggled against Turkish domination—is made to send, as he lies dying, to his mother:

The feeling displayed in these lines (which are credited by Passow to the town of Livadia (Λεβαδεία) in Boeotia) finds closely similar expression in a recently-published Macedonian folk-song. The latter however is not a mere copy of the former. Its metre is different, and further it is a folk-song of the romantic order, whereas the lines which I have quoted belong to an historical ballad. A youth is lowered by his brothers, so runs the story, into a well to get water for them, but the well proves to be haunted by a snake-like monster (στοιχειό[1374]) from whom they try in vain to rescue him. In this plight he cries to them:

Even more remarkable in its total absence of grief is a fragment given by Passow under the title of ‘the Wedding in Hades.’ The lamentation—for technically at least the poem falls into the class of ‘dirges’—is sung by a mother for her son, and she speaks of her own mother, who is already dead and in the nether world, as making preparation for the boy’s wedding in Hades.

From these passages and from many others conceived in the same spirit it will readily be seen that the thought of death as a kind of marriage, however mystical it may seem to us, is familiar to the modern Greek peasants. Nor has that thought become crystallised into a set form of words to be repeated without heed or understanding of their meaning. The very variety of treatment given to the idea proves that we are not dealing with a mere traditional expression or unmeaning commonplace, but with a vital belief still capable of stirring the ballad-maker’s imagination. Further it is this thought which almost alone strikes a note of cheerfulness and of hope in the popular dirges. The usual picture of the lower world is nothing but gloom and despair. It is a place of darkness on which the sun never shines, a place of ice and snow, and full of cob-webs. There are no churches there with bright golden icons; no quoits for the young men to throw; no looms for the women to ply. Hunger is not appeased, thirst not quenched, and sleep is denied. All is mourning and regret for the warm stirring life of the upper world, and anxious fears for wife or children left behind. Happy those who are allowed even to taste of the river of death, and to forget their homes and orphaned little ones. Thus with strange medley of ancient and modern is the dirge-singer wont to describe that lower world to which all the dead without distinction go. Yet even into these dirges, which—in order to excite the mourners to wilder displays of grief—purposely emphasize the gloomiest aspects of death, there is allowed to enter the one cheering thought that the departed for whom lamentation is made is not dead nor yet fallen on eternal sleep, but wedded in a new world; and it is worthy of notice that it is with this thought that many of the dirges end, as if this one consolation and hope were designed to assuage the pangs of sorrow which the first part of the dirge had excited.

Thus a brief study of the modern Greek dirges reveals to us the curious fact that a mystic conception of death is widely prevalent among the simple-minded peasants of Greece, and that, with all their naïveté in pourtraying the horrors of the lower world, it is from a recondite doctrine that they draw consolation. How came they to be the stewards of a doctrine so strange, so remote from the primitive simplicity of their ordinary life?

Once more we must look back to a pre-Christian antiquity, and seek again in Greek Tragedy the evidence of popular belief. Just as Aeschylus above all others has preserved to us the awful doctrine of future retribution for the deadly sin of blood-guilt, so from Sophocles we may learn the more comfortable doctrine that death, while it involves a parting from friends in this upper world, is also the means of drawing nearer, in an union as it were of wedlock, to the denizens of the lower world. The locus classicus for this conception is the Antigone. Throughout the latter part of that play, when once the doom of Antigone has been pronounced, the thought of her death as a wedding, and of the rock-hewn tomb where she is to be immured as a bridal-chamber, finds repeated and emphatic expression.

Of course it may be said that Antigone was the promised bride of Haemon, and that the poet in speaking of her tomb as a bridal-chamber was seeking to accentuate the pathetic contrast between her hopes and her destiny. That is true; but perhaps it is not the whole truth; perhaps Sophocles rather utilised the evident pathos of the situation for the purpose of covert allusion to doctrines which were in themselves unspeakable, such as Herodotus would have passed over with the words εὔστομα κείσθω. For we must not forget that the majority of an Athenian audience, initiated as they naturally would be in the Eleusinian mysteries, were familiar with religious teachings of which none might make explicit mention in the pages of literature open to the profane, but at which a poet might well hint in words which beneath their superficial meaning hid a truth intelligible to such as had ears to hear. Aeschylus indeed had once ventured too far in his allusions to the mysteries[1377]; but there is no improbability, or rather there is on that account an increased probability, in the supposition that a discreet and veiled allusion to unspeakable doctrines was permitted to the Tragic poet. Let us turn to the actual passages of the Antigone.

The first suggestion of the thought comes ironically enough, though it is but a faint suggestion, from the lips of Creon, who to Ismene’s exclamation, “Wilt thou indeed bereave thine own son of her?” retorts “’Tis Hades’ part to arrest this wedding[1378].” The thought is taken up later by the Chorus, who, after their hymn in honour of unconquerable Love, revert to words of pity for the woman there before them, and tell how they can no longer check the founts of tears, when they behold Antigone drawing near to ‘the bed-chamber where all must sleep’ (τὸν παγκοίταν θάλαμον)[1379]. Here the expression of the idea is becoming plainer, and it is no accident that the word θάλαμος, so commonly used of the bride-chamber, is here selected. But yet clearer words are to follow; for Antigone herself, in response to these words of compassion from the Chorus, interprets more boldly that at which they hint. ‘Me doth Hades, with whom all must sleep, bear off yet alive to Acheron’s shore, me that have had no part in wedlock, whose name hath never rung forth in bridal hymn, but ’tis Acheron I shall wed[1380].’

Nor does this clear pronouncement stand alone; thrice more, as the play advances, the same thought is echoed in unmistakeable tones. First comes the opening of that half impassioned, half sophistic, speech of Antigone, from which some critics would delete her argumentative estimate of a brother’s claims as against those of a husband; but the removal of those lines would still leave intact that outburst, ‘Oh tomb, oh bride-chamber, oh cavernous abode of everlasting durance[1381].’ And then again in the speech of the messenger, who bears tidings of the fate of both Antigone and her lover, the same thought is pressed upon us with double insistence. First he tells how, having given Polynices his full rites of burial, they turned to go next ‘unto the vaulted chamber where on couch of rock the maiden should be wed with Hades’ (πρὸς λιθόστρωτον κόρης νυμφεῖον Ἅιδου κοῖλον), and from afar is heard the voice of loud lament beside ‘the bridal chamber unhallowed by funeral rites’ (ἀκτέριστον ἀμφὶ παστάδα[1382]). And later in the same narrative, when we have heard how that voice of loud lament was stilled, Haemon is pictured as lying dead in Antigone’s dead embrace, having won his bridal’s fulfilment only in Hades’ house (τὰ νυμφικὰ τέλη λαχὼν δείλαιος ἐν γ’ Ἅιδου δόμοις)[1383].

The reiteration of a single thought through all this series of passages is most remarkable. What does it mean? Did Sophocles intend merely to enhance the tragedy of Antigone’s doom by constant comparison of that which might have been with that which was? Or did each phrase in which the thoughts of marriage and of death were blended contain a further and a subtler appeal to his hearers’ emotions? Did each phrase strike also a note which set vibrating in his listeners’ hearts responsive chords of mystic hope?

For my part, as I draw near the end of these studies in Greek religion, I find it more and more difficult to set down as mere casual coincidences the close resemblances between Greece in the past and Greece in the present. I have found a belief in the supernatural beings of Ancient Greece still swaying the minds of the modern peasants; I have seen the customs of antiquity repeated alike in the small acts of every-day life and in the ceremonies of its greater events; I have heard the same thoughts expressed in almost the same turns of phrase as in ancient literature; I have traced the popular conceptions of the present day concerning the relations of body and soul, and their existence after death, back to native pre-Christian sources. Have I then not a right, am I not bound, to abjure coincidence and to claim for the past and the present real identity? When I find in Sophocles the same thought, almost the same words, which may be gathered to-day from the lips of any unlettered lament-maker the whole Greek world over, I am compelled by my conviction of the continuity of all things Greek to believe that Sophocles adapted to his own use a thought which in his time even as now was uttered in many a funeral-dirge, and that while the phrases of the Antigone gained in his hands a new lustre from the pathos of their setting, they themselves were not new nor the invention of Sophocles’ genius, but an old heritage of the Greek race. Maybe it was that same thought which gave birth to the strange and but partially known legend of the death of Hymenaeus himself in the first moment of his wedded delight[1384]; maybe it was in the same spirit that Prometheus foretold how Zeus himself should make such a marriage as should cast him down from his throne of tyranny and he be no more seen, in fulfilment of the curse uttered by Cronos when he was cast down into the unseen world[1385].

But, it may be said, the forebodings of Prometheus are generally taken to refer to a future marriage with Thetis, not with death; and Pindar’s reference to Hymenaeus is vague and fragmentary; and the lines of Sophocles’ Antigone have plenty of human pathos, without reading into them any religious doctrine; let your contention at least have the support of sober prose which shows its meaning on the surface. So be it. Artemidorus in his hand-book to the interpretation of dreams claims as a recognised religious principle the correlation of marriage and death. To dream of the one is commonly a prognostication of the other. But let us hear his own words. “If an unmarried man dream of death, it foretells his marriage; for both alike, marriage and death, have universally been held by mankind to be ‘fulfilments’ (τέλη); and they are constantly indicated by one another; for the which reason also if sick men dream of marriage, it is a foreboding of death[1386].” And again: ‘if a sick person dream of sexual intercourse with a god or goddess ..., it is a sign of death; for it is then, when the soul is near leaving the body which it inhabits, that it foresees union and intercourse with the gods[1387].’ And yet once more: ‘since indeed marriage is akin to death and is indicated by dreaming of death, I thought it well to touch upon it here. If a sick man dreams of marrying a maiden, it is a sign of his death; for all the accompaniments of marriage are exactly the same as those of death[1388].’ The gist of these passages is unmistakeable; in clear and straightforward terms is enunciated the principle that death and marriage are so intimately associated that to dream of the one may portend the happening of the other. Here is the doctrine which we sought to elicit from the poetry of Sophocles and from the dirges of modern peasants, stated in plain prosaic language. Death is akin to marriage, and, as death approaches, men’s souls foresee a wedded union with gods.

But Artemidorus does not merely vouch for the existence of this mystic doctrine; he suggests also, to those who will weigh his words, that the doctrine was generally recognised and widely-spread: ‘for all the accompaniments of marriage,’ he says, ‘are exactly the same as those of death.’ What were these accompaniments? Seemingly Artemidorus had in mind certain customs which he had enumerated a little earlier, namely ‘an escort of friends, both men and women, and garlands and scents and unguents and an inventory of goods[1389]’ (i.e. either the marriage settlement or the last will and testament). It is then owing to this similarity between marriage-customs and funeral-customs that ‘if a sick man dreams of marrying a maiden, it is a sign of death.’ But previously we heard that if a sick person dreamt of commerce with a god or goddess, it was a sign of death, because, as death approached, the soul foresaw union and intercourse with the gods. How far do these statements agree? In both cases the interpretation of the dream is the same—to dream of marriage forebodes death—while the reasons for that interpretation are differently given according as the partner in the dreamt-of union is divine or human. But, though differently given, these reasons are not mutually inconsistent. In the one case the reason assigned is an idea—the idea that by death men were admitted to wedded union with their gods. In the other case the reason assigned is a custom—the custom of giving to the dead rites similar to the marriage-rites. In effect then the two reasons assigned are one and the same in spirit; for the ‘custom’ is merely the practical expression of the ‘idea’; it was because men believed that the dead attained to a wedded union with their gods, that they made the funeral-rites resemble the rites of marriage. And clearly this custom of assimilating the accompaniments of death to those of marriage could never have been general, as Artemidorus suggests, unless the belief, on which that custom was founded, had also been generally received and widely spread.

It will be worth while then to institute an enquiry into the customs generally observed both in ancient and modern times at weddings and at funerals. Our comparison of ancient literature with modern folk-songs, illumined by the statements of Artemidorus, has established the fact that death and marriage were very intimately associated in thought by some of the ancient writers as they are by many of the modern peasants. Custom will be found to tell the same tale, and will prove how generally accepted was this idea. For in point after point which Artemidorus does not mention in his brief enumeration—and without reckoning, as he does, such purely business matters as the inventory of goods—we shall find that the ceremonies incidental to a funeral have now, and had in old time, a curiously close resemblance to the ceremonies incidental to marriage; and, so finding, we may be confident that they were informed by a general and wide-spread belief that to die was but to marry into Hades’ house. Let us review them briefly and in order[1390].

The first ceremony in both functions alike was, and is, a solemn ablution. Before a Greek wedding both bride and bridegroom have always been required to bathe themselves, usually in water specially fetched from some holy spring. At Athens in old time, according to Thucydides, the spring frequented for this purpose was Callirrhoë[1391]; and similarly the Thebans had resort to the Ismenus[1392], the maidens of the Troad to the Scamander[1393], and the inhabitants of other districts to some spring or river of local repute[1394]. And at the present day in Athens it is still from Callirrhoë (when there is any water there) that the poorer classes fill the bridal bath; while many a village has its own sacred well or fountain (ἅγι̯ασμα) to which recourse is regularly had for this same purpose. And this wedding-ablution, common, as it would thus appear, to the Greeks of all ages, has its counterpart in the funeral-ablution, a ceremony likewise observed in all ages. Thus Sophocles makes Antigone speak of having washed with her own hands the dead bodies of father, mother, and brother[1395]; and Lucian in a mocking tone refers to the same practice as general in his day[1396]. At the present day the same rite is practically universal in Greece. In some places, and most notably in Crete, special magnificence is given to the ceremony by the use of warm wine instead of water; in others, as Macedonia[1397], the custom has dwindled away, and all that remains of it is a perfunctory moistening of the dead man’s face with a piece of cotton-wool soaked in wine. But in general the old custom remains unchanged. Thus we see that from ancient times down to the present day a ceremony of ablution has held a place in the preliminaries alike of a marriage and of a funeral.

Again in this matter of washing there is one detail of special interest. The water for the bridal bath was in old times fetched by a boy or girl[1398] closely related to the bride or the bridegroom, and the λουτροφόρος, as the bearer was called, is still an important figure in the wedding ceremonial of the present day. Nowadays, so far as I know, the bearer is always a boy, and further it is essential that both his parents be still living. The λουτροφόρος therefore has always been closely associated with the marriage-rite. But in antiquity the same water-bearer appears in another connexion. ‘It was customary,’ we hear, ‘to fetch water (λουτροφορεῖν) also for those who died unmarried, and that the figure of a water-bearer (λουτροφόρον) should be set up over their tomb. The figure was that of a boy with a pitcher[1399].’ Here we have a clear case of the importation of a ceremony closely connected with marriage into the funeral-rites of the unmarried. How are we to explain this custom? On what religious conception was it based? Clearly, it seems,—in view of that constant association of death and marriage which we have observed in ancient literature and modern folk-song—no other interpretation can well be maintained than that, for those who died unwed, death itself was the first and only marriage which they experienced, and that to such, ere they were laid in Hades’ nuptial-chamber, there ought to be given those same rites which were held to be a fitting preparation for entrance into the estate of wedlock in this world[1400].

The ceremonial ablutions being concluded, there came next the rites of anointing and arraying whether for marriage or for burial. As regards the cosmetics, we might feel well assured, even without the direct testimony of Aristophanes[1401], that they were freely used in ancient weddings; and I myself have experienced a sense of suffocation from the same cause at weddings in modern Greece. Similarly at ancient funerals the original purpose of the lecythi was without doubt to contain the choice perfumes for the anointing of the dead[1402]; and the custom of anointing is still well known. Then again in the matter of dress, the colour usually considered correct[1403] both for marriage and for burial was white, and, even if this cannot be said to have been universally the case, at any rate there was, and there still continues to be, no less pomp and ornament in the dress of the dead body[1404] than in the array of bride and bridegroom.

In this connexion too we may notice the use of the actual bridal-dress in the funerals of betrothed girls and of young wives. That this practice was known in antiquity is proved by a passage of Chariton[1405], in which the heroine of his story, Callirrhoë, whose first adventure, soon after her wedding, consists in being carried out to burial while unconscious but not dead, is described as ‘dressed in bridal array’; and exactly the same custom may be witnessed in Greece to-day[1406]. In fact not only may the person of the dead be seen dressed as for a wedding, but in the folk-songs we hear of the tomb itself being adorned like the home to which the bride should have been led.

Yet another point of coincidence between the ceremonial of marriage and of funeral is the wearing of a crown. In ancient times ‘chaplets,’ says Becker[1408], ‘were certainly worn both by bride and bridegroom,’ and in modern usage they are as essential to the marriage ceremony as the wedding-rings. At a certain point in the service, it is the duty of the best man, assisted by the chief bridesmaid, to keep exchanging the rings from the hands of the bride and bridegroom, and in like manner to exchange the crowns which they wear from the head of one to the head of the other; and as the rings are always worn afterwards, so the two crowns are carefully preserved and hung up together in the new home. Equally well-established is the use of garlands in ancient funerals[1409], and, if not quite universal at the present day[1410], they are at any rate commonly employed in the funerals of women and children. In Macedonia it is actually the bridal crown which is worn for burial by anyone who was betrothed or newly married[1411].

Worthy of notice too is the not uncommon spectacle of an apple, quince[1412], or pomegranate laid among the flowers with which the bier is adorned; for all these three fruits have their special significance in relation to marriage. The classical custom of throwing an apple into a girl’s lap as a sign of love is a method of wooing still known to the rustic swain. It is not indeed regarded as a highly respectable method, but perhaps neither in old times was it so; for then, as now, the more well-conducted youths seem to have had their wooing, if such it may be called, carried on through the agency of an elderly lady (in ancient Greek προμνήστρια, in modern προξενήτρια) whose negotiations were chiefly addressed to the parents on either side, and whose conversation smacked more of dowry than of love. The quince and the pomegranate however are employed without any offence to propriety. The former is in some districts the food of which the newly-married pair are required to partake together at their first entry into their new home; and it is hoped that the sweetness of the fruit will so temper their lips that nothing but sweet words will ever be addressed by the one to the other. To the open-minded observer it might appear that acidity rather than sweetness was the chief characteristic of the quince, and that, if the qualities of the fruit are found to affect the tones of those who eat it, they would be better advised, as is the custom in some villages, to substitute for the quince a well-sugared cake or a dish of honey. But the pomegranate is far more commonly used than the quince, and in a variety of ways. Sometimes the bride and bridegroom eat together of it; elsewhere the bridegroom proffers it to the bride as his first gift on her entrance to their home, and she alone eats of it; or again she may be required to hurl it down and scatter its seeds over the floor. The second of these methods of using the pomegranate at marriage is, it will be remembered, of venerable antiquity; it was a seed of this fruit which Hades gave to Persephone to eat, that when she visited again the upper world she might not remain there all her days with reverend, dark-robed Demeter, but return to her home in the nether world[1413]; and similarly at the Argive Heraeum, the bride of Zeus was represented by Polyclitus holding in one of her hands the fruit of the pomegranate, concerning which, says Pausanias, there is a mystic story not to be divulged[1414]. Here again then is found the same close association of death and marriage. The three fruits, apple, quince, and pomegranate, each of which possesses a special use and purport in the preliminaries or the actual ceremony of marriage, are also the fruits most commonly laid upon the bier, in token, as it must appear, that death is but a marriage into the unseen world. In the light of such customs we can read with fuller understanding that simple and yet mystic dirge, ‘The Wedding in Hades’:

Thus in point after point the rites of marriage and the rites of death among Greeks both past and present have been found to coincide; and the number of these points of coincidence is too large to admit of their being referred to accident; design is evident. We are bound to suppose either that marriage-ceremonies were deliberately transferred to the funeral-rite, or that funeral-ceremonies were deliberately transferred to the marriage-rite. Which supposition shall we prefer? There can be no real question. It is impossible to conceive of a people so cynical or so distempered as to darken the wedding-day with grim reminders of death. But to transfer some of the usages of marriage to the funeral-scene was to infuse one ray of hope where all else was sorrow and darkness, to teach that, though the dead and the mourners might grieve for their parting, yet by that parting from the old home the dead was to enter upon a new life, a life of wedded happiness, in the unseen world. For indeed if there were no such intention as this, what was the meaning of the λουτροφόρος set up over the grave of the unmarried, what the purpose of adorning the dead with wedding-garment and wedding-crown? These two acts at least are no accidents; they reveal a studied purpose of assimilating the usages of death to the usages of marriage; and if that purpose underlay two of the customs enumerated, there is good warrant for the belief that in all the coincidences between marriage-rites and funeral-rites the same thought was operating—that very thought which has been found to be the common property of the Greek race, from one of the masters of ancient tragedy down to the humblest peasant of our day. Custom past and present, ancient literature, modern folk-song, all agree in their presentment of death as a marriage into the house of Hades.

On this popular and withal recondite conception of death were founded, I believe, the highest religious aspirations of the ancient Greeks. Such as had served their gods piously and purely in this life might hope to win a closer union, as of wedlock, with those gods in the life hereafter. To them there could be neither blasphemy nor presumption in their hope; for to pious believers the fabled experience of their own ancestors in this life was a warrant for aspiring themselves to the same bliss at least hereafter; what had been, might be again. Nay, more; not only was the belief that the highest bliss of the hereafter consisted in the marriage of men with their gods free from all reproach of impiety, but it was the logical development of two religious sentiments which we have already reviewed—the desire for close communion between gods and men, and the belief that men after death and dissolution would still enjoy, like their gods, corporeal existence. A previous chapter has been devoted to a detailed examination of the means whereby men in their daily life sought to maintain communication with the powers above them—oracles from which all might enquire and win inspired response; interpretation of the flight and cries of birds that were the messengers of heaven; reading of the signs written by the finger of some god on the flesh of the victim presented to him; divination from sight and sound and dream; sacrifice whereby some message of prayer might be sent with speed and safety to the god who had power to fulfil it. And in general it will, I think, be admitted that the main tendency of Greek religious thought was to draw gods and men nearer together, alike by an anthropomorphic conception of the gods and by an apotheosis of human beauty; that it was to subserve this end that Art became the handmaid of Religion, and strove to express the divine in terms of the human, to discover in man the potentialities of godhead. All religious hope and ambition and effort turned upon communion with the gods. How then in the next world should hope be fulfilled, ambition satisfied, effort rewarded? What should be the glorious consummation? Marriage was the closest communion between mortals in this world; marriage, so sang the poets, bound gods together in closest communion. Men’s aspirations for communion with their gods could find no final satisfaction save in marriage. To the few, we may suppose—men of refined and reflective mind, capable of imagining spiritual joys—this marriage of men and gods was but a mystic, figurative expression for the union of man’s soul with the soul of God, a thought as chastened and innocent of all sensuous connotation as the thought of many a woman who in a later era, withdrawn from the world, has comforted her loneliness with the hope of being the bride of Christ. But the many, I suspect, flinched not before a bold and literal interpretation of the thought, and, believing that, when death and physical dissolution were past, body as well as soul survived in another world, dared dream that having passed the gates of mortality into the demesne of the immortals they should be wedded, body and soul, in true wedlock with those deities who by veiled communion with them in this world had prepared them for sight and touch and full fruition hereafter.

But, it will be asked, where in all Greek literature can we find a statement, where even a hint, of this strange doctrine? Nowhere a statement; often a hint; for these were things not to be divulged to the profane. To those alone who were initiated into the Mysteries was the doctrine revealed, and even to them, it may be, in parables only whose inner meaning each must probe for himself.

There have of course been those who have made light of the mysteries of the old Greek religion, and have seen in them nothing but the impositions of a close hierarchy playing upon the ignorance and credulity and fear of the common-folk. But when we consider the veneration in which the more famous mysteries were held for many centuries, when we remember that Eleusis was respected and left inviolate not only by the Lacedaemonians and other Greek peoples when they invaded Attic territory, but even by the Persians who had dared to devastate the Acropolis, and in later times by the yet ruder Celts, then it is easier to believe that we are dealing with a great religious institution based upon solid principles and vital doctrines which deserved a wide-spread and long-continued reverence from mankind, than that it was all the elaborate and empty hoax of a crafty priesthood.

Nor again does the view which makes Demeter simply a corn-goddess and the Eleusinian mysteries a portentous harvest-thanksgiving—and that apparently somewhat premature—require any long or serious consideration. Corn indeed was one of the blessings given by Demeter to this upper world of living men; perhaps in the very earliest ages of her worship this was the sum total of the boons which men sought of her; doubtless even in her fully-developed mysteries a part of men’s thanks were still for the garnered harvest of the last year and for the promise which the green fields gave of her bounty once more to be renewed; for even in the nineteenth century of the Christian era her statue amid the ruins of Eleusis was still associated by the peasants with agriculture, and the removal of it, they apprehended, would cause a failure of the crops[1416]. But in old time this was not all. To speak of Demeter as a mere personification of cereals is to advocate a partial truth little better than the cynical falsehood which makes her only the stalking-horse of designing priests. For what said men of light and learning among the ancients[1417], men who knew the whole truth and the whole Spirit of her worship? ‘Thrice happy they of men that have looked upon these rites ere they go to Hades’ house; for they alone there have true life, the rest have nought there but ill[1418].’ So Sophocles, in language clearly recalling that of the so-called Homeric hymn[1419] to Demeter; and in harmony with him Pindar: ‘Happy he that hath seen those rites ere he go beneath the earth; he knoweth life’s consummation, he knoweth its god-given source[1420].’ And surely such consummation of life should be in that paradise, where ‘mid meadows red with roses lieth the space before the city’s gates, all hazy with frankincense and laden with golden fruits,’ where ‘the glorious sun sheds his light while night is here[1421]’; for to this belief even Aristophanes subscribes, neither daring nor wishing to make mock of the blessed ones who in the other world have part in the god-beloved festival, and wend their way with song and dance through the holy circle of the goddess, a lawn bright with flowers, meadows where roses richly blossom—on whom alone in their night-long worship the sun yet shines and a gracious light, for that they have learnt the mysteries and dealt righteously with all men[1422].

Here then are the three great masters of lyric poetry, of tragedy, and of comedy in substantial agreement; and the hopes which they hold out are not the mere exuberance of poetic fancy, for sober prose affirms the same beliefs. What says Isocrates? ‘Demeter ... being graciously minded towards our forefathers because of their services to her, services of which none but the initiated may hear, gave us the greatest of all gifts, first, those fruits of the earth which saved us from living the life of beasts, and secondly, that rite which makes happier the hopes of those that participate therein concerning both the end of life and their whole existence; and our city proved herself not only god-beloved but also loving toward mankind, in that, having become mistress of such blessings, she grudged them not to the rest of the world, but gave to all men a share in that she had received[1423].’ Of this passage Lobeck[1424] was disposed to make light, and that for the reason that Isocrates in another passage[1425], with less orthodoxy perhaps and more charity, in speaking of the pious and upright in general, employs part of the same phrase which in the passage before us he applies to the initiated only. All good men, he says, have happier hopes ‘concerning their whole existence’; virtue, that is, may expect a reward, vice a punishment, either here or hereafter. Are these fair grounds on which to condemn his reference to the mysteries as a meaningless common-place? If any comment is to be made upon this repetition of a well-known phrase, would it not be fairer to note that in reference to the mysteries he speaks of men’s happier hopes not only generally—‘concerning their whole existence’ (περὶ τοῦ σύμπαντος αἰῶνος) but also specifically—‘concerning the end of life’ (περὶ τῆς τοῦ βίου τελευτῆς), and thus echoes the words of Pindar above quoted, ‘he knoweth the consummation of life’ (οἶδεν μὲν βιότου τελευτάν)? Nor is there any dearth of other authorities to prove that it was after death that the hopes of the initiated should ‘be emptied in delight.’ Let us hear Aristides. ‘Nay, but the benefit of the (Eleusinian) festival is not merely the cheerfulness of the moment and the freedom and respite from all previous troubles, but also the possession of happier hopes concerning the end, hopes that our life hereafter will be the better, and that we shall not lie in darkness and in filth—the fate that is believed to await the uninitiated[1426].’ Such seem to have been the general terms in which the benefits of the mysteries might be recommended to the profane. The same ideas, almost the same phrases, occur again and again. Witness the well-known story of Diogenes the Cynic, who, when urged by a young man to get himself initiated, answered, ‘It is strange, my young friend, if you fancy that by virtue of this rite the publicans will share with the gods the good things of Hades’ house, while Agesilaus and Epaminondas lie in filth[1427].’ Or again let us read the advice of Crinagoras to his friend: ‘Set thy foot on Cecropian soil, that thou may’st behold those nights of Demeter’s great mysteries, which shall free thee from care among the living, and, when thou goest where most are gone, shall make thy heart lighter[1428].’ And with equal seriousness Cicero, who in his ideal state would forbid all nocturnal rites as tending towards excesses, would except the Eleusinian mysteries, not only because of their humanising and cheering influence upon men’s life in this world but also because they furnish better hopes in death[1429].

Such are the most important passages bearing upon the religious as opposed to the temporal and agricultural aspects of Demeter’s worship, such the general terms in which the blessings flowing therefrom were overtly described by men who knew the details of the covert doctrine. The information contained in them amounts to this: the initiated received in the mysteries a hope, a pledge, perhaps a foretaste, of the future bliss reserved for them only; the profane should lie in filth and outer darkness; the blessed should dwell in pleasant meadows, and the sun should shine bright upon them; they should be god-beloved, and should share with the gods the good things of the next world.

Now obviously these vague and general promises are conceived in the tone and the spirit of that popular religion which had sprung from the very heart of the Hellenic folk. The pleasant meadows where the initiated should dwell are none other than that place which appears once as the asphodel mead, anon as the islands of the blessed or as part of the under-world, and is now named Paradise. The light which illumines even the night-time of the blessed is the necessary contrast to the murky gloom of a nether abode, conceived almost in the spirit of Homer, where the profane must lie as in a slough. And finally the close communion of the blessed with gods who love them is the consummation of those hopes which the whole Hellenic people entertained, and of those efforts which the whole Hellenic people put forth, to attain to close intercourse in this life with the gods whom they worshipped. Clearly then the general promises, whose inner mysteries were revealed only to the initiated, were based upon the old ideals, the innate beliefs, the traditional hopes, in a word, the natural and spontaneous religion of the Hellenic race.

And, as at Eleusis, so probably in other mysteries. In a famous passage Theo Smyrnaeus[1430] compares the successive steps to be taken in the study of philosophy with the several stages of initiation in mysteries, and Lobeck[1431] in his examination of the passage has shown that the reference is not to the mysteries of Eleusis, or at any rate not to them only. It is probable enough that Theo was speaking of mysteries in general, both public and private, in most of which there were, doubtless, several grades of initiation, and he may even have selected the details of his illustration (for it is an analogy only, not an argument, in which he is engaged) from different rites. Yet for his fifth and final stage of initiation, beyond even ‘open vision’ (ἐποπτεία) and ‘exposition’ (δᾳδουχία or ἰεροφαντία), he names that bliss which is the outcome of the earlier stages, the bliss of being god-beloved and sharing the life of gods (ἡ κατὰ τὸ θεοφιλὲς καὶ θεοῖς συνδιαιτὸν εὐδαιμονία).

The recurrence of the word θεοφιλής in the above passages, whether in reference to the Eleusinian or to other mysteries, cannot but excite attention; and we shall not I think go far astray if we take the last phrase of Theo Smyrnaeus, ‘the bliss of being god-beloved and sharing the life of gods,’ as an epitome of the somewhat vague and general promises held out to the profane as an inducement to initiation. This was the fulfilment of those ‘happier hopes’—to use another recurrent phrase—of which the initiated might only speak in guarded fashion. The exact interpretation of this phrase, as we shall have reason to believe when we consider the separate rites in detail, was the great mystic secret. But of that more anon; for the present let us suppose that the general assurances openly given concerning both the Eleusinian and other mysteries are fairly summed up in the promise ‘of being god-beloved and of sharing the life of gods.’ Such a promise appealed to those innate hopes of the whole Greek race which manifested themselves in their constant striving after close intercourse and communion with their gods; in other words, the happier hopes concerning the hereafter, which the mysteries sought to appropriate and to reserve to the initiated alone, had for their basis the natural religion of the Hellenic folk.

To admit this is necessarily to admit the validity of Lobeck’s refutation of those critics who have sought to father on the mysteries, usually on those of Eleusis, doctrines and ideas foreign to, or even incompatible with, popular Greek religion—pantheism, the emanation of the human soul from the soul of God, the transmigration of souls, the Platonic theory of ideas, the unity of God omnipotent and omniscient[1432], and such-like religious products of different ages and different climes. For if we were to accept the view that the teaching of the mysteries was a thing apart from the ordinary trend and tenor of the popular religion, then we should be compelled to regard those general promises of future bliss (which were in truth, as we have just seen, based upon popular religion) as a fraudulent bait designed to entice men away from their old beliefs and to ensnare them in dogma and priestcraft; and if any would impute fraud, there awaits them the task of convicting Pindar, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Isocrates, and others who wrote of that which they knew, of conspiracy to deceive.

But while the promises held forth by the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and therefore also the doctrines which elucidated those vague promises, were a product of the popular religion, those doctrines themselves were not a matter of popular knowledge. The very fact of initiation, the death-penalty inflicted upon the profane who by any means penetrated to the scene of the mysteries, the wild indignation excited in Athens by a charge of mocking the mystic rites, the scrupulous privacy observed in investigating that charge before a court composed of the initiated only—all these are proofs that Eleusis was the school of secret beliefs and hopes held in deep veneration by those to whom the knowledge of them was vouchsafed. Secret doctrines existed; that which had sprung from the beliefs of the many had become the property of the few. How can this be explained?

The explanation is not difficult. The worship of Demeter and possibly many other rites which were afterwards called ‘mysteries’ were the most holy part of the religion of the Pelasgians; and when the Achaeans, a people of strange tongue and strange religion, came among them, the Pelasgians would not admit them to a knowledge of their rites but thenceforth performed those rites in secrecy. This is proved by two facts. First, the rites which at Eleusis, in Samothrace, and among the Cicones in Thrace, the country of Orpheus, were imparted as mysteries to the initiated only, were in Crete open to all and there was no obligation to secrecy concerning them[1433]. Secondly, at Eleusis at any rate the purity required of candidates for initiation was not only physical and spiritual, as secured by ablution and abstinence, but also linguistic; it was necessary καθαρεύειν τῇ φωνῇ[1434], to speak the Greek language purely. These two facts taken together solve the difficulty. Before the coming of the Achaeans the whole Pelasgian population whether of the Greek mainland or of such an island as Crete celebrated the rites of Demeter openly. In Crete, where no Achaeans penetrated, the old custom naturally continued unchanged. On the mainland the influx of a people of strange tongue and strange religion necessitated secrecy in the native rites, lest the presence of men who knew not Demeter should profane her worship; the right of entry therefore at her festivals was decided by the simplest test of Achaean or Pelasgian nationality, the test of speech; and in later times, when the Achaeans had acquired the Pelasgian speech[1435], the customs thus established were not abolished; the rites of Demeter remained ‘mysteries’ to be conducted in secret, and the Shibboleth was still exacted.

Since then we may not seek in the teachings of the mysteries anything alien from the spirit of the popular religion, the scope of our enquiry is more limited and its course more clear. The secret to be discovered is something which had been evolved from the popular religion, some intensification and higher development of those hopes and beliefs, yearnings and strivings, which have continuously marked the religious life of the Greek folk. Now the mass of the Greek people have always hoped and believed, as their care for the dead has constantly shown, that beyond death and dissolution lay a life in which body and soul should be re-united and restored to their old activity; the mysteries might well confirm the initiated in that expectation and picture to them the happy habitations where they should dwell. Again the mass of the Greek people have always yearned and striven by manifold means in this life for close communion with their gods; the mysteries might well be a sacrament which afforded to the initiated both a means and a pledge of enjoying in the next world, to which body as well as soul should pass, the closest of all communion with their gods, the union of wedlock.

Let it then be supposed that the two main ideas of the mysteries, whether expounded in speech or represented in ritual, were these—bodily survival after death, and marriage of men with gods; what would have been the natural attitude of Christians towards these doctrines? For it is in the light of the charges brought by early Christian writers against the mysteries that such a supposition must first be examined. The doctrine of the immortality of the body as well as of the soul was evidently little exposed to Christian attacks; and it may have been because the Christian doctrine of the resurrection had much in common with the old Greek doctrine, that St Paul found among his audience on the Areopagus some who did not mock, but said ‘We will hear thee again of this matter.’ But with the further doctrine of marriage between men and gods Christianity could have no sympathy, but would inevitably regard it as offensive both in theology and in morality, as implying the existence of a plurality of gods, and as savouring of that sensuality, which above all other sin the apostle to the Gentiles set himself to combat.

And it is in fact upon these two points that the mass of the accusations brought by early Christian writers against Greek paganism hinge and hang. These were the points at which Greek religion seemed to its assailants most readily vulnerable, and against which they sought to use as weapons the very language of paganism itself. Just as Clement of Alexandria[1436] seeks to prove out of the mouth of Homer, who speaks of the gods in general as δαίμονες[1437], that the Greek gods are confessedly mere demons (for the word δαίμων had seemingly deteriorated in meaning), that is to say, abominable and unclean spirits, enemies of the one true God, so too the words ἄρρητος and ἀπόρρητος, used by the pagans of their ‘unspeakable’ mysteries, were misinterpreted by the Christians with one consent and became a handle for convicting the old religion of ‘unnameable’ impurities.

With the question of polytheism however we are not further concerned; whether the Hellenic gods were true gods, as their worshippers held, or devils, as Clement thought, or non-existent, as many will think to-day, matters not; all that we need to know in this respect is known, namely, that the mysteries, like the popular religion, acknowledged a plurality of gods; for in the Eleusinian drama alone several gods played a part. It is rather the frequent and violent charges of impurity which call for investigation.

A few examples will suffice for the present. A comprehensive denunciation is that of Eusebius, who charges the pagans with celebrating, ‘in chant and hymn and story and in the unnameable rites of the mysteries, adulteries and yet baser lusts, and incestuous unions of mother with son, brother with sister[1438].’ And again he says, ‘In every city rites and mysteries of gods are taught, in harmony with the mythical stories of old time, so that even now in these rites, as well as in hymns and odes to the gods, men can hear of marriages of the gods, and of their procreation of children, and of dirges for death, and of drunken excesses, and of wanderings, and of passionate love or anger[1439].’ Equally outspoken is Clement of Alexandria in his ‘Exhortation to the heathen.’ Some specific statements in that work concerning the mysteries of several gods, though they support the general charges of impurity, may be postponed for later examination. It will be enough here to adduce the phrases in which, after denouncing those who, whether in the mysteries of the temples or the paintings with which their own houses were adorned, loved to look upon the lusts of gods (he risks even the word πασχητιασμοί), and ‘regarded incontinence as piety,’ Clement reaches the climax of his invective:—‘Such are your models of voluptuousness, such your creeds of lust, such the doctrines of gods who commit fornication with you; for, as the Athenian orator says, what a man wishes, that he also believes[1440].’ This brutal directness of Clement is however hardly more effective than the elegant innuendo of Synesius in dealing with the same subject. Commenting on the secrecy of the nocturnal rites, he describes them as celebrated at ‘times and places competent to conceal ἀρρητουργίαν ἔνθεον[1441]’—a phrase which I despair of rendering, for the ‘unspeakable acts’ to which ‘divine frenzy’ led, are those which are either too holy or too infamous to be named.