Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
Jane Ellen Harrison
1903

CHAPTER X.

ORPHIC MYSTERIES.

THE OMOPHAGIA.

Zagreus | The Titans | The Mountain Mother | The Kouretes | Hosioi and Hosia | Orphic Asceticism | Aristophanes on Orphism | The Liknophoria | The Sacred Marriage | The Oath of the Celebrants | Orphic Elements In Eleusinian Ritual | Iacchos at Eleusis | The Liknophoria at Eleusis | The Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth at Eleusis | Thessalian influence at Eleusis. Brimo, Eumolpos | The Delphic Dionysos at Eleusis and Agrae | The Greater and Lesser Mysteries | Delphic Influence at Eleusis | Crete and the Mysteries

THE most important literary document extant on Orphic ceremonial is a fragment of the Cretans of Euripides, preserved for us by Porphyry in his treatise on 'Abstinence from Animal Food' a passage Porphyry says he had'almost forgotten to mention.'

From an allusion in Aristophanes to 'Cretan monodies and unhallowed marriages' it seems probable that the Cretans dealt with the hapless wedlock of Pasiphae, The fragment, Porphyry tells us, was spoken by the chorus of Cretan mystics who have come to the palace of Minos. It is possible they may have come to purify it from the recent pollution.

The mystics by the mouth of their leader make full and definite confession of the faith, or rather acknowledgement of the ritual acts, by which a man became a 'Bacchos,' and they add a statement of the nature of the life he was thereafter bound to lead. Though our source is a poetical one, we learn from it, perhaps to our surprise, that to become a 'Bacchos' it was necessary to do a good deal more than dance enthusiastically upon the mountains. The confession runs as follows:

'Lord of Europa's Tyrian line,
Zeus-born, who boldest at thy feet
The hundred citadels of Crete,
I seek to thee from that dim shrine,

Hoofed by the Quick and Carven Beam,
By Chalyb steel and wild bull's blood
In flawless joints of cypress wood
Made steadfast. There in one pure stream

My days have run, the servant I,
Initiate, of Idaean Jove;
Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove;
I have endured his thunder-cry:

Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts;
Held the Great Mother's mountain flame;
I am Set Free and named by name
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests.

Robed in pure white I have borne me clean
From man's vile birth and coffined clay,
And exiled from my lips alway
Touch of all meat where Life hath been.'

This confession must be examined in detail.

The first avowal is:

'the servant I,
Initiate, of Idaean Jove.'

It is remarkable that the mystic, though he becomes a 'Bacchos' avows himself as initiated to Idaean Zeus. But this Idaean Zeus is clearly the same as Zagreus, the mystery form of Dionysos. Zeus, the late comer, has taken over an earlier worship, the nature of which will become more evident after the ritual has been examined.

Zeus has in a sense supplanted Zagreus, but only by taking on his nature. An analogous case has already been discussed in dealing with Zeus Meilichios. At a time when the whole tendency of theology, of philosophy and of poetry was towards monotheism these fusions were easy and frequent. Of such a monotheistic divinity, half Zeus, half Hades, wholly Ploutos, we are told in another fragment of Euripides preserved by Clement of Alexandria. His ritual is that of the earth-gods.

Ruler of all, to thee I bring libation
And honey cake, by whatso appellation
Thou wouldst be called, or Hades, thou, or Zeus,
Fireless the sacrifice, all earth's produce
I offer. Take thou of its plenitude,
For thou amongst the Heavenly Ones art God,
Dost share Zeus'sceptre, and art ruling found
With Hades o'er the kingdoms underground.'

Zagreus

It has been conjectured that this fragment also is from the Cretans, but we have no certain evidence. Clement says in quoting the passage that'Euripides, the philosopher of the stage, has divined as in a riddle that the Father and the Son are one God.' Another philosopher before Euripides had divined the same truth, and he was Orpheus, only he gave to his Father and Son the name of Bacchos, and, all important for our purpose, gave to the Son in particular the title of Zagreus.

In discussing the titles of Dionysos, it has been seen that the names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, were given to the god to mark him as a spirit of intoxication, of enthusiasm. The title Zagreus has been so far left unconsidered because it is especially an Orphic name. Zagreus is the god of the mysteries, and his full content can only be understood in relation to Orphic rites.

Zagreus is the mystery child guarded by the Kouretes, torn in pieces by the Titans. Our first mention of him is a line preserved to us from the lost epic the Alcmaeonis, which ran as follows:

Holy Earth and Zagreus greatest of all gods.'

The name of Zagreus never occurs in Homer, and we are apt to think that epic writers were wholly untouched by mysticism. Had the Alcmaeonis not been lost, we might have had occasion to modify this view. It was an epic story the subject-matter of which was necessarily a great sin and its purification, and though primarily the legend of Alcmaeon was based, as has been seen, on a curiously physical conception of pollution, it may easily have taken on Orphic developments. Zagreus appears little in literature; he is essentially a ritual figure, the centre of a cult so primitive, so savage that a civilized literature instinctively passed him by, or at most figured him as a shadowy Hades.

But religion knew better. She knew that though Dionysos as Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, as god of intoxication, was much, Dionysos as Zagreus, as Nyktelios, as Isodaites, he of the night, he who is'a meal shared by all'was more. The Orphics faced the most barbarous elements of their own faith and turned them not only qua theology into a vague monotheism, but qua ritual into a high sacrament of spiritual purification. This ritual, the main feature of which was'the red and bleeding feast,'must now be examined.

The avowal of the first certain ritual act performed comes in the line where the mystic says

I have
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts

The victim in Crete was a bull.

The shrine of Idaean Zeus, from which the mystics came, was cemented with bulls' blood . Possibly this may mean that at its foundation a sacred bull was slain and his blood mixed with the mortar; anyhow it indicates connection with bull-worship. The characteristic mythical monster of Crete was the bull-headed Minotaur. Behind the legend of Pasiphae, made monstrous by the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors, it can scarcely be doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony of ritual wedlock with a primitive bull-headed divinity. He need not have been imported from Thrace; zoomorphic naturegods spring up everywhere. The bull-Dionysos of Thrace when he came to Crete found a monstrous god, own cousin to himself.

Such a monstrous god is depicted on the curious seal-impression found by Mr Arthur Evans at Cnossos and reproduced in fig. 146. He is seated on a throne of camp-stool shape, and before hinnj stands a human figure, probably a worshipper. That the monster is a god seems clear from the fact that he is seated; that he is a bull-god is not so certain. The head is not drawn with sufficient exactness for us to be sure what beast is intended. He has certainly no horns, but the hoof and tail might be those of a bull. The seal-impressions found by Mr Hogarth in such large numbers at Zakro show how widespread in Crete were these fantastic forms. The line between man and beast is a faint one.

Mr Hogarth holds that the majority of these sealings have nothing to do with cults they are the product, he thinks, of an art which has'passed from monsters with a meaning to monsters of pure fancy.'He excepts however certain sealings where a Minotaur is represented, a monster with horned bull-head, pronounced bovine ears and tail, but apparently human trunk, arms and legs.

Like the monster in fig. 146, this Minotaur is seated, but with his left leg crossed human-fashion over his right knee and with human hands extended.

The traditional Minotaur took year by year his tale of human victims. Of the ritual of the bull-god in Crete, we know that it consisted in part of the tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is the dreadful suspicion of human sacrifice.

Part of the avowal of the Cretan mystic is that he has accomplished the rite of 'the feast of raw flesh.' That a feast of raw flesh of some sort was traditionally held to be a part of Bacchic ceremonial, is clear from the words Euripides put into the mouth of his Maenads:

'The joy of the red quick fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,'

where the expression in the original, 'joy in eating raw flesh,' admits of no doubt.

An integral part of this terrible ritual was the tearing asunder of the slain beast, in order, no doubt, to get the flesh as raw as might be, for the blood is the life. Plutarch, in his horrified protest against certain orgiastic rites, joins the two ritual acts together, the'eatings of raw flesh'and the 'rendings asunder' 'There are certain festivals' he says, 'and sacrificial ceremonies as well as unlucky and gloomy days, in which take place eatings of raw flesh and rendings asunder, and fastings and beatings of the breast, and again disgraceful utterances in relation to holy things, and mad ravings and yells upraised with a loud din and tossing of the neck to and fro.' These ceremonies, he goes on to explain, are, to his thinking, not performed in honour of any god, but'they are propitiations and appeasements performed with a view to the riddance of mischievous demons; such also, he says, were the human sacrifices performed of old.' Plutarch's words read like a commentary on the Orphic ritual under discussion: we have the fasting, we have the horrid feast; he sees the savage element of 'riddance' but he misses the saving grace of enthusiasm and mystic significance.

If the sympathetic religious-minded Plutarch was horrified at a ritual so barbarous, it filled the Christian Fathers with unholy joy. Here was an indefeasible argument against paganism, and for once they compel our reluctant sympathy. 'I will not', cries Clement, dance out your mysteries, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will strip them naked, and bring them out on to the open stage of life, in view of those who are the spectators at the drama of truth. The Bacchoi hold orgies in honour of a mad Dionysos, they celebrate a divine madness by the Eating of Raw Flesh, the final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the flesh of butchered victims, they are crowned with snakes, and shriek out the name of Eva, that Eve through whom sin came into the world, and the symbol of their Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent'. And again: 'the mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman; for while he was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing their armed dance about him, the Titans stole upon him, deceived him with childish toys and tore him to pieces'.

Arnobius pretends that the Bacchanalia are so horrible he must pass them by, and then goes on to revel in revolting detail over the rites'which the Greeks call Feasts of Raw Flesh in which with feigned frenzy and loss of a sane mind you twine snakes about you, and, to show yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god, you demolish with gory mouths the entrails of goats bleating for mercy.' The gentle vegetarian Porphyry knows that in Chios, according to tradition, there had been a Dionysos called Omadius, the Raw One, and that the sacrifice he used to exact was the tearing of a man to pieces. Istros stated that of old the Kouretes sacrificed children to Kronos. On Kronos all human sacrifice was apt to be fathered, but the mention of the Kouretes, coupled with the confession of the Cretan mystic, shows that the real divinity is Zagreus.

To these vague though consistent traditions of the eating and tearing of raw flesh, whether of man or goat or calf, in honour of some form of Dionysos, evidence more precise and definitely descriptive of Cretan ritual has been left us, again by a Christian Father, Firmicus Maternus. The festival he describes was, like many others in honour of Dionysos, trieteric, i.e. celebrated each alternate year.

Firmicus in the fashion of his day gives first a long and purely aetiological narrative of the death of the son of a king of Crete, to appease whose wrath the ceremony, it was believed, was instituted.'The Cretans commemorated the death of the boy by certain ceremonies, doing all things in regular order which the boy did or suffered.' These ceremonies included an enactment of the scene of the child playing with the toys and surprised by the Titans, and perhaps originally the slaying and tearing to pieces of a real child, but in the festival as described by Firmicus a bull was surrogate.'They tear in pieces a live bull with their teeth and by howling with discordant shouts through the secret places of the woods they simulate the madness of an enraged mind.'

Firmicus, by his obviously somewhat inaccurate statement, has gone far to discredit his own testimony. After the performance of a religious ceremony that involved the tearing of a live bull's flesh by human teeth the surviving worshippers would be few. But, because of this exaggeration, we need not discredit the whole ritual of the bull-slaying, nor the tearing and eating of raw, though not actually living, flesh. The bull indeed comes in so awkwardly in the midst of the aetiological story of the child, that we may be practically sure this account of a bygone ritual is authentic.

Some light is thrown on the method, and much on the meaning, of the horrible feast by an account left us by S. Nilus, a hermit of Mt. Sinai in the 4th century, of the sacrifice of a camel among the Arabs of his time. S. Nilus seems to have spent some of his abundant leisure in the careful examination of the rites and customs of the heathen around, and it is much to be regretted that in his 'Narrations' he has not recorded more of his observations. The nomadic condition of the Arabs about Sinai impressed him much; he notes that they are without trade, arts or agriculture, and if other food failed them, fed on their camels and only cooked the flesh just enough to enable them to tear it with their teeth. They worshipped no god, either in spirit or through an image made by hands, but sacrificed to the morning star at its rising. They by preference sacrificed boys in the flower of their age and of special beauty, and slew them at dawn on a rude heap of piled-up stones. He pathetically observes that this practice of theirs caused him much anxiety; he was nervous lest they should take a fancy to a beautiful young boy convert he had with him and sacrifice'his pure and lovely body to unclean demons.'But, he goes on,'when the supply of boys was lacking, they took a camel of white colour and otherwise faultless, bent it down upon its knees, and went circling round it three times in a circuitous fashion. The leader of the song and of the procession to the star was either one of their chiefs or a priest of special honour. He, after the third circuit had been made, and before the worshippers had finished the song, while the last words were still on their lips, draws his sword and smites the neck of the camel and eagerly tastes of the blood. The rest of them in like fashion run up and with their knives some cut off a small bit of the hide with its hairs upon it, others hack at any chance bit of flesh they can get. Others go on to the entrails and inwards and leave no scrap of the victim uneaten that might be seen by the sun at its rising. They do not refrain even from the bones and marrow, but overcome by patience and perseverance the toughness of the resistance'.

The account of Nilus leaves no doubt as to the gist of the ceremony: the worshippers aim at devouring the victim before the life has left the still warm blood. Raw flesh, Prof. Robertson Smith points out, is called in Hebrew and Syriac'living 'flesh.' Thus, in the most literal way, all those who shared in the ceremony absorbed into themselves part of the victim's life.

For live bull then we substitute raw bull, and the statement of Firmicus presents no difficulties. Savage economy demands that your juju, whatever it may be, should be as fresh as possible. Probably, at first, the bull may have been eaten just for the sake of absorbing its strength, without any notion of a divine sacrament.

The idea that by eating an animal you absorb its qualities is too obvious a piece of savage logic to need detailed illustration. That the uneducated and even the priestly Greek had not advanced beyond this stage of sympathetic magic is shown by a remark of Porphyry's. He wants to prove that the soul is held to be affected or attracted even by corporeal substances of kindred nature, and of this belief he says we have abundant experience.

'At least,' he says,'those who wish to take unto themselves the spirits of prophetic animals, swallow the most effective parts of them, such as the hearts of crows and moles and hawks, for so they possess themselves of a spirit present with them and prophesying like a god, one that enters into them themselves at the time of its entrance into the body. If a mole's heart can make you see into dark things, great virtue may be expected from a piece of raw bull. It is not hard to see how this savage theory of communion would pass into a higher sacramentalism, into the faith that by partaking of an animal who was a divine vehicle you could enter spiritually into the divine life that had physically entered you, and so be made one with the god. It was the mission of Orphism to effect these mystical transitions.

Because a goat was torn to pieces by Bacchants in Thrace, because a bull was, at some unknown date, eaten raw in Crete, we need not conclude that either of these practices regularly obtained in civilized Athens. The initiated bull-eater was certainly known of there, and the notion must have been fairly familiar, or it would not have pointed a joke for Aristophanes. In the audacious prorrhesis of the Frogsthe uninitiated are bidden to withdraw, and among them those

'Who never were trained by bull-eating Kratinos
In mystical orgies poetic and vinous.'

The worship of Dionysos of the Raw Flesh must have fallen into abeyance in Periclean Athens; but though civilized man, as a rule, shrinks from raw meat, yet, given imminent peril to rouse the savage in man, even in civilized man the faith in Dionysos Omestes burns up afresh. Hence stories of human sacrifice on occasions of great danger rise up and are accepted as credible. Plutarch, narrating what happened before the battle of Salamis, writes as follows: 'As Themistocles was performing the sacrifice for omens alongside of the admiral's trireme, there were brought to him three captives of remarkable beauty, attired in splendid raiment and gold ornaments; they were reputed to be the sons of Artayktes and Sandauke sister to Xerxes. When Euphrantides the soothsayer caught sight of them,and observed that at the same moment a bright flame blazed out from the burning victims, and at the same time a sneeze from the right gave a sign, he took Themistocles by the hand and bade consecrate and sacrifice all the youths to Dionysos Omestes, and so make his prayer, for thus both safety and victory would ensue to the Greeks. Themistocles was thunderstruck at the greatness and strangeness of the omen, it being such a thing as was wont to occur at great crises and difficult issues, but the people, who look for salvation rather by irrational than rational means, invoked the god with a loud shout together, and bringing up the prisoners to the altar imperatively demanded that the sacrifice should be accomplished as the seer had prescribed. These things are related by Phanias the Lesbian, a philosopher not unversed in historical matters.' Phanias lived in the 4th century B.C. Plutarch evidently thought him a respectable authority, but the fragments of his writings that we possess are all of the anecdotal type, and those which relate to Themistocles are evidently from a hostile source. His statement, therefore, cannot be taken to prove more than that a very recent human sacrifice was among the horrors conceivably possible to a Greek of the 4th century B.C., especially if the victim were a 'barbarian.'

The suspicion is inevitable that behind the primitive Cretan rites of bull-tearing and bull-eating there lay an orgy still more hideous, the sacrifice of a human child. A vase-painting in the British Museum, too revolting for needless reproduction here, represents a Thracian tearing with his teeth a slain child, while the god Dionysos, or rather perhaps we should say Zagreus, stands by approving. The vase is not adequate evidence that human children were slain and eaten, but it shows that the vase-painter of the 5th century B.C. believed such a practice was appropriate to the worship of a Thracian god.

A very curious account of a sacrifice to Dionysos in Tenedos helps us to realize how the shift from human to animal sacrifice, from child to bull or calf, may have come about. Aelian in his book on the Nature of Animals makes the following statement: 'The people of Tenedos in ancient days used to keep a cow with calf, the best they had, for Dionysos, and when she calved, why, they tended her like a woman in child-birth. But they sacrificed the new born calf, having put cothurni on its feet. Yes, and the man who struck it with the axe is pelted with stones in the holy rite and escapes to the sea.'The conclusion can scarcely be avoided that here we have a ritual remembrance of the time when a child was really sacrificed. A calf is substituted but it is humanized as far as possible, and the sacrificer, though he is bound to sacrifice, is guilty of an outrage Anyhow, that the calf was regarded as a child is clear; the line between human and merely animal is to primitive man a shifting shadow.

The mystic in his ritual confession clearly connects his feast of raw flesh with his service of Zagreus:

Where midnight Zagreus roves, I rove;
I have endured his thunder-cry;
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.'

It remains to consider more closely the import of the sacred legend of Zagreus.

That the legend as well as the rite was Cretan and was connected with Orpheus is expressly stated by Diodorus. In his account of the various forms taken by the god Dionysos, he says 'they allege that the god (i.e. Zagreus) was born of Zeus and Persephone in Crete, and Orpheus in the mysteries represents him as torn in pieces by the Titans.

When a people has outgrown in culture the stage of its own primitive rites, when they are ashamed or at least a little anxious and self-conscious about doing what yet they dare not leave undone, they instinctively resort to mythology, to what is their theology, and say the men of old time did it, or the gods suffered it. There is nothing like divine or very remote human precedent. Hence the complex myth of Zagreus. When precisely this myth was first formulated it is impossible to say; it comes to us in complete form only through late authors. It was probably shaped and re-shaped to suit the spiritual needs of successive generations. The story as told by Clement and others is briefly this: the infant god variously called Dionysos and Zagreus was protected by the Kouretes or Korybantes who danced around him their armed dance. The Titans desiring to destroy him lured away the child by offering him toys, a cone, a rhombos, and the golden apples of the Hesperides, a mirror, a knuckle bone, a tuft of wool. The toys are variously enumerated. Having lured him away they set on him, slew him and tore him limb from limb. Some authorities add that they cooked his limbs and ate them. Zeus hurled his thunderbolts upon them and sent them down to Tartaros. According to some authorities, Athene saved the child's heart, hiding it in a cista. A mock figure of gypsum was set up, the rescued heart placed in it and the child brought thereby to life again. The story was completed under the influence of Delphi by the further statement that the limbs of the dismembered god were collected and buried at Delphi in the sanctuary of Apollo.

The monstrous complex myth is obviously aetiological through and through, the kernel of the whole being the ritual fact that a sacrificial bull, or possibly a child, was torn to pieces and his flesh eaten. Who tore him to pieces? In actual fact his worshippers, but the myth-making mind always clamours for divine precedent. If there was any consistency in the mind of the primitive mythologist we should expect the answer to be 'holy men or gods,' as an example. Not at all. In a sense the worshipper believes the sacrificial bull to be divine, but, brought face to face with the notion of the dismemberment of a god, he recoils. It was primitive bad men who did this horrible deed. Why does he imitate them? This is the sort of question he never asks. It might interfere with the pious practice of ancestral custom, and custom is ever stronger than reason. So he goes on weaving his aetiological web. He eats the bull; so the bad Titans must have eaten the god.. But, as they were bad, they must have been punished; on this point primitive theology is always inexorable. So they were slain by Zeus with his thunderbolts.

Other ritual details had of course to be worked in. The Kouretes, the armed Cretan priests, had a local war or mystery dance: they were explained as the protectors of the sacred child. Sacred objects were carried about in cistae; they were of a magical sanctity, fertility-charms and the like. Some ingenious person saw in them a new significance, and added thereby not a little to their prestige; they became the toys by which the Titans ensnared the sacred baby. It may naturally be asked why were the Titans fixed on as the aggressors? They were of course known to have fought against the Olympians in general, but in the story of the child Dionysos they appear somewhat as bolts from the blue. Their name even, it would seem, is aetiological, and behind it lies a curious ritual practice.

The Dionysiaca of Nonnus is valuable as a source of ritual and constantly betrays Orphic influence. From it we learn in many passages that it was the custom for the mystae to bedaub themselves with a sort of white clay or gypsum. This gypsum was so characteristic of mysteries that it is constantly qualified in Nonnus by the epithet 'mystic.' The technical terms for this ritual act of bedaubing with clay were 'to besmear' and 'to smear off', and they are used as roughly equivalent for 'to purify.' Harpocration has an interesting note on the word 'smear off'.' Others use it in a more special sense, as for example when they speak of putting a coat of clay or pitch on those who are being initiated, as we say to take a cast of a statue in clay; for they used to besmear those who were being purified for initiation with clay and pitch. In this ceremony they were mimetically enacting the myth told by some persons, in which the Titans, when they mutilated Dionysos, wore a coating of gypsum in order not to be identified. The custom fell into disuse, but in later days they were plastered with gypsum out of convention. Here we have the definite statement that in rites of initiation the worshippers were coated with gypsum. The 'some persons' who tell the story of Dionysos and the Titans are clearly Orphics. Originally, Harpocration says, the Titans were coated with gypsum that they might be disguised. Then the custom, by which he means the original object of the custom, became obsolete, but though the reason was lost the practice was kept up out of convention. They went on doing what they no longer understood.

The Titans

Harpocration is probably right. Savages in all parts of the world, when about to perform their sacred mysteries, disguise themselves with all manner of religious war-paint. The motive is probably, like most human motives, mixed; they partly want to disguise themselves, perhaps from the influence of evil spirits, perhaps because they want to counterfeit some sort of bogey; mixed with this is the natural and universal instinct to'dress up'on any specially sacred occasion, in order to impress outsiders. An element in what was at once a disguise and a decoration was coloured clay. Then having become sacred from its use on sacred occasions it became itself a sort of medicine, a means of purification and sanctification, as well as a ceremonial sign and token of initiation. Such performances went on not only in Crete but in civilized Athens. One of the counts brought by Demosthenes against Aeschines was, it will be remembered,'that he purified the initiated and wiped them clean with mud and pitch' with, be it noted, not from. Cleansing with mud does not seem to us a practical procedure, but we are back in the state of mind fully discussed in an earlier chapter, when purification was not physical cleansing in our sense of the word, but a thing at once lower and higher, a magical riddance from spiritual evil, from evil spirits and influences. For this purpose clay and pitch were highly efficacious.

But what has all this to do with the Titans? Eustathius, commenting on the word Titan, lets us into the secret. We apply the word titanos in general to dust, in particular to what is called asbestos, which is the white fluffy substance in burnt stones. It is so called from the Titans in mythology, whom Zeus in the story smote with his thunderbolts and consumed to dust. For from them, the fine dust of stones which has got crumbled from excessive heat, so to speak Titanic heat, is called titanic, as though a Titanic penalty had been accomplished upon it. And the ancients call dust and gypsum titanos.

This explanation is characteristically Eustathian. In his odd confused way the Archbishop, as so often, divines a real connection, but inverts and involves it. The simple truth is that the Titan myth is a 'sacred story' invented to account for the ritual fact that Orphic worshippers, about to tear the sacred bull, daubed themselves with white clay, for which the Greek word was titanos: they are Titans, but not as giants, only as white-clad men. It is not exactly a false etymology, as the mythological Titan giant probably owed his name to the fact that he was clay-born, earth-born, like Adam, only of white instead of red earth; but it was of course a false connection of meaning.

That this connection of meaning, this association of white-claymen of the mysteries with primaeval giants, was late and fictitious is incidentally shown by the fact that it was fathered on Onomacritus. In the passage from Pausanias already quoted, we are told that Onomacritus got the name of the Titans from Homer, and composed 'orgies' for Dionysos, and made the Titans the actual agents in the sufferings of Dionysos. He did not invent the white-clay worshippers, but he gave them a respectable orthodox Homeric ancestry. What confusion and obscurity he thereby introduced is seen in the fact that a bad mythological precedent is invented for a good ritual act; all consistency was sacrificed for the sake of Homeric association.

But nothing, nothing, no savage rite, no learned mythological confusion, daunts the man bent on edification, the pious Orphic. The task of spiritualizing the white-clay-mei, the dismembered bull, was a hard one, but the Orphic thinker was equal to it. He has not only taken part in an absurd and savage rite, he has brooded over the real problems of man and nature. There is evil in the universe, human evil to which as yet he does not give the name of sin, for he is not engaged with problems of free-will, but something evil, something that mixes with and mars the good of life, and he has long called it impurity. His old religion has taught him about ceremonial cleansings and has brought him, through conceptions like the Keres, very near to some crude notion of spiritual evil. The religion of Dionysos has forced him to take a momentous step. It has taught him not only what he knew before that he can rid himself of impurity, but also that he can become a Bacchos, become divine. He seems darkly to see how it all came about, and how the old and the new work together. His forefathers, the Titans, though they were but 'dust and ashes,' dismembered and ate the god; they did evil, and good came of it; they had to be punished, slain with thunderbolts; but even in their ashes lived some spark of the divine; that is why he their descendant can himself become Bacchos. From these ashes he himself has sprung. It is only a little hope; there is all the element of dust and ashes from which he must cleanse himself; it will be very hard, but he goes back with fresh zeal to the ancient rite, to eat the bull-god afresh, renewing the divine within him.

Theology confirms his hope by yet another thought. Even; the wicked Titans, before they ate Dionysos, had a heavenly ancestry; they were children of old Ouranos, the sky-god, as well as of Ge, the earth-mother. His master Orpheus worshipped the sun.

Can he not too, believing this, purify himself from his earthly nature and rise to be the'child of starry heaven'? Perhaps it is not a very satisfactory theory of the origin of evil; but is the sacred legend of the serpent and the apple more illuminating? Anyhow it was the faith and hope the Orphic, as we shall later see, carried with him to his grave.

There were other difficulties to perplex the devout enquirer. The god in the mysteries of Zagreus was a bull, but in the mysteries of Sabazios (p. 419) his vehicle was a snake, and these mysteries must also enshrine the truth. Was the father of the child a snake or a bull; was the horned child'a horned snake? It was all very difficult. He could not solve the difficulty; so he embodied it in a little dogmatic verse, and kept it by him as a test of reverent submission to divine mysteries:

'The Snake's Bull-Father the Bull's Father-Snake.'

The snake, the bull, the suake-bull-child 'not three Incomprehensibles, but one Incomprehensible.' On the altar of his Unknown God through all the ages man pathetically offers the holocaust of his reason.

The weak point of the Orphic was, of course, that he could not, would not, break with either ancient ritual or ancient mythology, could not trust the great new revelation which bade him become 'divine,' but must needs mysticize and reconcile archaic obsolete traditions. His strength was that in conduct he was steadfastly bent on purity of life. He could not turn upon the past and say, 'this daubing with white clay, this eating of raw bulls, is savage nonsense; give it up.' He could and did say, 'this daubing with white clay and eating of raw bulls is not in itself enough, it must be followed up by arduous endeavour after holiness.'

This is clear from the further confession of the Cretan chorus, to which we return. From the time that the neophyte is accepted as such, i.e. performs the initiatory rites of purification and thereby becomes a Mystes, he leads a life of ceremonial purity (dyvov). He accomplishes the rite of eating raw sacrificial flesh and also holds on high the torches to the Mountain Mother. These characteristic acts of the Mystes, are, I think, all preliminary stages to the final climax, the full fruition, when, cleansed and consecrated by the Kouretes, he is named by them a Bacchos, he is made one with the god.

The Mountain Mother

Before we pass to the final act consummated by the Kouretes, the place of the Mountain Mother has to be considered. The mystic's second avowal is that he has

'Held the Great Mother's mountain flame.'

In the myth of Zagreus, coming to us as it does through late authors, the child is all-important, the mother only present by implication. Zeus the late comer has by that time ousted Dionysos in Crete. The mythology of Zeus, patriarchal as it is through and through, lays no stress on motherhood. Practically the Zeus of the later Hellenism has no mother. But the bull-divinity worshipped in Crete was wholly the son of his mother, and in Crete most happily the ancient figure of the mother has returned after long burial to the upper air. On a Cretan seal Mr Arthur Evans found the beast-headed monster whom men called Minotaur; on a Cretan seal also he found the figure of the Mountain Mother, found her at Cnossos, the place of the birth of the bull-child, Cnossos overshadowed by Ida where within the ancient cave the holy child was born and the'mailed priests'danced at his birth.

The design in fig. 147 is from the clay impression of a signet ring found at the palace at Cnossos. It is a veritable little manual of primitive Cretan faith and ritual. On the very apex of her own great mountain stands the Mountain Mother. The Mycenaean women of Cnossos have made their goddess in their own image, clad her, wild thing though she was, in their own grotesque flounced skirt, and they give her for guardians her own fierce mountain-ranging lions, tamed into solemn heraldic guardians. We know the lions well enough; they came to Mycenae to guard the great entrance-gate. Between them at Mycenae is a column, a thing so isolated and protected, that we long suspected it was no dead architectural thing but a true shrine of a divinity, and here on the Cretan seal the divinity has come to life. She stands with sceptre or lance extended, imperious, dominant. Behind her is her shrine of 'Mycenaean' type, with its odd columns and horns, these last surely appropriate enough to a cult whose central rite was the sacrifice of a bull; before her in rapt ecstasy of adoration stands her Mystes.

Pre-historic Crete has yielded, I venture to think will yield, no figure of a dominant male divinity, no Zeus; so far we have only a beast-headed monster and the Mountain Mother. The little seal impression is a standing monument of matriarchalism. In Greece the figure of the Son was developed in later days, the relation of Mother arid Son almost forgotten; child and parent were represented by the figures of the Mother and the Daughter. It matters very little what names we give the shifting pairs. In Thrace, in Asia Minor, in Crete, the primitive form is the Mother with the Son as the attribute of Motherhood; the later form the Son with the Mother as the attribute of Sonship. A further development is the Son with only a faded Mother in the background, Bacchos and Semele; next the Son is made the Son of his Father, Bacchos is Dionysos; finally he eclipses his Father and reigns omnipotent as Zeus-Hades. The Mother with the Son as attribute came back from Asia Minor to Greece when in Greece the Mother was but the appendage of the Son, and coming made sore confusion for mythology. But for prehistoric Crete, for the Cretan mystic of Euripides in the days of Minos, the ritual is of the Mother and the Son.

The Kouretes

The 'mystic' holds aloft the torches of the mother. Fire as well as water is for cleansing. He is finally consecrated (oaiwOefo) by the Kouretes:

'I am Set Free and named by name A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests.'

The Kouretes need not long detain us. They are the Cretan brothers of the Satyrs, the local Satyrs of Crete. Hesiod knows of their kinship: from the same parent

'The goddesses, nymphs of the mountain, had their being,
And the race of the worthless do-nothing Satyrs,
And the divine Kouretes, lovers of sport and dancing.'

Hesiod's words are noteworthy and characteristic of his theological attitude. The Satyrs, we have seen, are Satrai, primitive Dionysos-worshippers of Thrace and Thessaly. Seen through the hostile eyes of their conquerors they have suffered distortion and degradation in form as in content, they are horse-men, worthless, idle. The Kouretes have just the same beginning in actuality, but their mythological ending is different. They are seen, not through the distorting medium of conquest, but with the halo of religion about their heads; they are divine and their dancing is sacred. It all depends on the point of view.

Strabo, in his important discussion of the Kouretes and kindred figures, knows that they are all ministers of orgiastic deities, of Rhea and of Dionysos; he knows also that Kouretes, Korybantes, Daktyloi, Telchines and the like represent primitive populations. What bewilders him is the question which particular form originated the rest and where they all belong. Did Mother Rhea send her Korybants to Crete? how do the Kouretes come to be in Aetolia? Why are they sometimes servants of Rhea, sometimes of Dionysos? why are some of them magicians, some of them handicraftsmen, some of them mystical priests? In the light of Prof. Ridgeway's investigations, discussed in relation to the Satyrs, all that puzzled Strabo is made easy to us.

The Kouretes then are, as their name betokens, the young male population considered as worshipping the young male god, the Kouros', they are 'mailed priests' because the young male population were naturally warriors. They danced their local war-dance over the new-born child, and, because in those early days the worship of the Mother and the Son was not yet sundered, they were attendants on the Mother also. They are in fact the male correlatives of the Maenads as Nurses. The women-nurses were developed most fully, it seems, in Greece proper; the male attendants, in Asia Minor and the islands.

In the fusion and confusion of these various local titles given to primitive worshippers, this blend of Satyrs, Korybants, Daktyls, Telchines, so confusing in literature till its simple historical basis is grasped, one equation is for our purpose important Kouretes = Titans. The Titans of ritual, it has been shown, are men bedaubed with white earth. The Titans of mythology are children of Earth, primitive giants rebellious against the new Olympian order. Diodorus knows of a close connection between Titans and Kouretes and attempts the usual genealogical explanation. The Titans, he says, are, according to some, sons of one of the Kouretes and of a mother called Titaia; according to others of Ouranos and Ge. Titaia is mother Earth. The Cretans, he says, allege that the Titans were born in the age of the Kouretes and that the Titans settled themselves in the district of Cnossos 'where even now there are shown the site and foundations of a house of Rhea and a cypress grove dedicated from ancient days.' The Titans as Kouretes worshipped the Mother, and were the guardians of the Son, the infant Zagreus, to whom later monotheism gave the name of Zeus.

From the time that the neophyte enters the first stage of initiation, i.e. becomes a 'mystic', he leads a life of abstinence. But abstinence is not the end. Abstinence, the sacramental feast of raw flesh, the holding aloft of the Mother's torches, all these are but preliminary stages to the final climax, the full fruition when, cleansed and consecrated, he is made one with the god and the Kouretes name him 'Bacchos.'

The word 'pure,' in the negative sense, 'free from evil,' marks, I think, the initial stage a stage akin to the old service of 'aversion'. The word 'set free', 'consecrated', marks the final accomplishment and is a term of positive content. It is characteristic of orgiastic, 'enthusiastic' rites, those of the Mother and the Son, and requires some further elucidation.

Hosioi and Hosia

At Delphi there was an order of priests known as Hosioi. Plutarch is our only authority for their existence, but, for Delphic matters, we could have no better source. In his 9th Greek Question he asks 'who is the Hosioter among the Delphians, and why do they call one of their months Bysios?' The second part of the question only so far concerns us as it marks a connection between the Hosioter and the month Bysios, which, Plutarch tells us, was at the 'beginning of spring' the 'time of the blossoming of many plants.' On the 8th day of this month fell the birthday of the god and in olden times'on this day only did the oracle give answers.

Plutarch's answer to his question is as follows: 'They call Hosioter the animal sacrificed when a Hosios is designated.'He does not say how the animal's fitness was shown, but from another passage we learn that various tests were applied to the animals to be sacrificed, to see if they were 'pure, unblemished and uncorrupt both in body and soul.' As to the body Plutarch says it was not very difficult to find out. As to the soul the test for a bull was to offer him barley-meal, for a he-goat vetches; if the animal did not eat, it was pronounced unhealthy. A she-goat, being more sensitive, was tested by being sprinkled with cold water. These tests were carried on by the Hosioi and by the 'prophets', these last being concerned with omens as to whether the god would give oracular answers. The animal, we note, became Hosios when he was pronounced unblemished and hence fit for sacrifice: the word carried with it the double connotation of purity and consecration; it was used of a thing found blameless and then made over to, accepted by, the gods.

The animal thus consecrated was called Hosioter, which means 'He who consecrates.' We should expect such a name to be applied to the consecrating priest rather than the victim. If Plutarch's statement be correct, we can only explain Hosioter on the supposition that the sacrificial victim was regarded as an incarnation of the god. If the victim was a bull, as in Crete, and was regarded as divine, the title would present no difficulties.

That the Hosioter was not merely a priest is practically certain from the fact that there were, as already noted, priests who bore the cognate title of Hosioi. Of them we know, again from Plutarch, some further important particulars. They performed rites as in the case of the testing of the victims in conjunction with the 'prophets'or utterers of the oracle, but they were not identical with them. On one occasion, the priestess while prophesying had some sort of fit, and Plutarch mentions that not only did all the seers run away but also the prophet and'those of the Hosioi that were present.'

In the answer to his 'Question' about the Hosioter, Plutarch states definitely that the Hosioi were five in number, were elected for life, and that they did many things and performed sacred sacrifices with the'prophets.'Yet they were clearly not the same. A suspicion of the real distinction dawns upon us when he adds that they were reputed to be descended from Deucalion. Deucalion marks Thessalian ancestry and Thessaly looks North. We begin to surmise that the Hosioi were priests of the immigrant cult of Dionysos. This surmise approaches certainty when we examine the actual ritual which the Hosioi performed.

It will be remembered' that when Plutarch is describing the ritual of the Bull Dionysos, he compares it, in the matter of 'tearings to pieces' and burials and new births, to that of Osiris. Osiris has his tombs in Egypt and 'the Delphians believe that the fragments of Dionysos are buried near their oracular shrine, and the Hosioi offer a secret sacrifice in the sanctuary of Apollo at the time when the Thyiades wake up Liknites.' To clinch the argument Lycophron tells us that Agamemnon before he sailed

'Secret lustrations the Bull did make
Beside the caves of him the God of Gain
Delphinios,'

and that in return for this Bacchus Enorches overthrew Telephos, tangling his feet in a vine. The scholiast commenting on the 'secret lustrations' says, 'because the mysteries were celebrated to Dionysos in a corner.' It is, I think, clear that the mysteries of Liknites at Delphi, like those of Crete, included the sacrifice of a sacred bull, and that the bull at Delphi was called Hosioter, that, in a word, Hosioi and Hosioter are ritual terms specially linked with the primitive mysteries of Dionysos.

The word Hosios was then, it would seem, deep-rooted in the savage ritual of the Bull; but with its positive content, its notion of consecration, it lay ready to hand as a vehicle to express the new Orphic doctrine of identification with the divine. Its use was not confined to Dionysiac rites, though it seems very early to have been specialized in relation to them, probably because the Orphics always laid stress on fas rather than nefas. In ancient curse-formularies, belonging to the cult of Demeter and underworld divinities, the words 'consecrated and free' are used in constant close conjunction and are practically all but equivalents. The offender, the person cursed, was either 'sold' or 'bound down' to the infernal powers; but the cursing worshipper prays that the things that are accursed, i.e. tabooed to the offender, may to him be 'consecrated and free,' i.e. to him they are freed from the taboo. It is the dawning of the grace in use to-day 'Sanctify these creatures to our use and us to thy service'; it is the ritual forecast of a higher guerdon, 'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'

This primitive notion of release from taboo, which lay at the root of the Orphic and Christian notion of spiritual freedom, comes out very clearly in the use of the word aoaiovadai. For this word we have no exact English equivalent, but it may be rendered as'to purify by means of an expiatory offering.'Plato in the Laws describes the ceremonial to be performed in the case of a man who has intentionally murdered one near of kin. The regular officials are to put him to death, and this done'let them strip him, and cast him outside the city into a place where three ways meet, appointed for the purpose, and on behalf of the city collectively let the authorities, each one severally, take a stone and cast it on the head of the dead man, and thereby purify the city.' The significance of this ritual is drastically explicit. The taint of the murder, the taboo of the blood-guilt, is on the whole city; the casting of the stones, on behalf of the city, purifies it off on to the criminal; it is literally conveyed from one to other by the stone. The guilty man is the pharmakos, and his fate is that of a pharmakos;' this done let them carry him to the confines of the city, and cast him out unburied, as is ordained.' Dedication, devotion of the thing polluted, is the means whereby man attains consecration. The scholiast on the passage has an interesting gloss on the word consecration.' It is used', he says, 'as in this passage, to mean " to purify," or " to bring first-fruits," or " to give honour," or " to give a meed of honour on the occasion of death," or "to give fulfilment."' He feels dimly the shifts and developments of meaning. You can devote, 'make over 'a pharmakos; you can devote, consecrate first-fruits, thereby releasing the rest from taboo; you can consecrate a meed of honour on the occasion of death.

In this connection it is interesting to note the well-known fact that in common Greek parlance ootos is the actual opposite of iepos. Suidas tells us that a ocriov xwplov is 'a place on which you may tread, which is not sacred, into which you may go.' He quotes from the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, where a woman with child prays:

'O holy Eileithyia, keep back the birth
Until I come unto a place allowed'

He further notes the distinction often drawn by the orators between goods that are sacred and those that are (in the Latin sense) profane. The contrast is in fact only fully intelligible when we go back to the primitive notions, under a taboo, released from a taboo. The notion 'released from a taboo' was sure to be taken up by a spiritual religion, a religion that aimed at expansion, liberation, enthusiasm rather than at check, negation, restraint. If we may trust Suidas, the word qctioi was applied to those who 'were nurtured in piety, even if they were not priests.' The early Christians owed some of their noblest instincts to Orphism.

As we find ocrios contrasted with lepos, so also between the two kindred words caoaipa and oo-toay a distinction may be observed. Both denote purification, but ocrtoo marks a stage more final and complete. It is the word chosen to describe the state of those who are fully initiated. Plutarch says that the souls of men pass, by a natural and divine order, from mortal men to heroes, from heroes to daemons, and finally, if they are completely purified and consecrated, as if by a rite of initiation they pass from daemons to the gods. Lucian again in speaking of the final stage of initiation reserved for hierophants uses the word consecrated'.

Plutarch makes another interesting suggestion. In a wild attempt to glorify Osiris and make him the god of everything, he derives his name from the two adjectives ovtos and iepos, and incidentally lets fall this suggestive remark,'the name of Osiris is so compounded because his significance is compounded of things in heaven and things in Hades. It was customary among the ancients to call the one oaia the other iepd.' The things of the underworld are ocria; of the upper sky, things Ouranian, Iepd. Translated into ritual, this means that the old underworld rites already discussed, the rites of the primitive Pelasgian stratum of the population, were known as ocna, the new burnt sacrifices of the Ouranians or Olympians were Iepd. Dionysos was of the old order: his rites were ocria, burial rites were ocria. It was the work of Orpheus to lift these rites from earth to heaven, but spiritualized, uplifted as they are, they remain in their essence primitive. It is because of this peculiar origin that there is always about something of an antique air; it has that 'imprint of the ancient,' that 'crust and patina' of archaism, which lamblichus says were characteristic of things Pythagorean, and which, enshrining as it does a new life and impulse, lends to Orphism a grace all its own. Moreover, though ooos is so 'free' that it verges on the profane, the secular, yet it is the freedom always of consecration, not desecration; it is the negation of the Law, but only by the Gospel. Hence, though this may seem paradoxical, it is concerned rather with the Duty towards God, than the Duty towards our Neighbour. Rising though it does out of form, it is so wholly aloof from formalism, that it tends to become the 'unwritten law.' Hence such constant oppositions as 'allowed by neither human prescription nor divine law,' and again 'right neither in the eye of God nor of man.' Plato says'he who does what is proper in relation to man, would be said to do just things, he who does what is proper towards God, holy things.'Hence finally the spiritual illumination and advance of breaking through human Justice for the Divine Right, the duty, sacred, sacrosanct, of rebellion.

The Greeks had their goddess Dike, she who divides and apportions things mortal, who according to Hesiod was sister of the lovely human figures, Fair Order and Peace. But, because she was human, she carried the symbol of human justice, the sword. She lapses constantly into Vengeance. The Bacchants of Euripides are fully initiated, consecrated as well as cleansed, yet in their hour of extreme need it is to this Goddess of Vengeance they cry for visible, physical retribution on the blasphemer Pentheus:

'Hither for doom and deed,
Hither with lifted sword,
Justice, Wrath of the Lord,
Come in our visible need,
Smite till the throat shall bleed,
Smite till the heart shall bleed
Him the tyrannous, lawless, godless, Echion's earth-born seed.'

Orpheus did all he could to raise the conception of Dike. We are expressly told that it was he who raised her to be the 'Assessor of Zeus.' Demosthenes pleads with his fellow citizens to honour Fair Order, who loves just deeds and is the Saviour of cities and countries, and Justice (Dike), holy and unswerving, whom Orpheus who instituted our most sacred mysteries declares to be seated by the throne of Zeus. The dating of Orphic hymns is precarious, but it looks as though Demosthenes had in his mind the Orphic Hymn to Dike or at least its prototype:

'I sing the all-seeing eye of Dike of fair form,
Who sits upon the holy throne of Zeus
The king, and on the life of mortals doth look down,
And heavy broods her justice on the unjust.'

The Orphic could not rid himself of the notion of Vengeance. Dike as avenger finds a place, it will be seen later (p. 612), in the Orphic Hades. Hosia, the real Heavenly Justice, she who is Right and Sanctity and Freedom and Purity all in one, never attained a vivid and constant personality; she is a goddess for the few, not the many; only Euripides called her by her heavenly name and made his Bacchants sing to her a hymn:

'Thou Immaculate on high;
Thou Kecording Purity;
Thou that stoopest, Golden Wing,
Earthward, manward, pitying,
Hearest thou this angry king?'

It was Euripides, and perhaps only Euripides, who made the goddess Hosia in the image of his own high desire, and, though the Orphic word and Orphic rites constantly pointed to a purity that was also freedom, to a sanctity that was by union with rather than submission to the divine, yet Orphism constantly renounced its birth-right, reverted as it were to the old savage notion of abstinence. After the ecstasy of

'I am Set Free and named by name
A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests,'

the end of the mystic's confession falls dull and sad and formal:

'Kobed in pure white I have borne me clean
From man's vile birth and coffined clay,
And exiled from my lips alway
Touch of all meat where Life hath been.'

He that is free and holy and divine, marks his divinity by a dreary formalism. He wears white garments, he flies from death and birth, from all physical contagion, his lips are pure from flesh-food, he fasts after as before the Divine Sacrament. He follows in fact all the rules of asceticism familiar to us as 'Pythagorean'.

Orphic Asceticism

Diogenes Laertius in his life of Pythagoras gives a summary of these prescriptions, which show but too sadly and clearly the reversion to the negative purity of abstinence . 'Purification, they say, is by means of cleansings and baths and aspersions, and because of this a man must keep himself from funerals and marriages and every kind of physical pollution, and abstain from all food that is dead or has been killed, and from mullet and from the fish melanurus, and from eggs, and from animals that lay eggs, and from beans, and from the other things that are forbidden by those who accomplish holy rites of initiation.' The savage origin of these fastings and taboos on certain foods has been discussed; they are deep-rooted in the ritual of aTrorpoTrrf, of aversion, which fears and seeks to evade the physical contamination of the Keres inherent in all things. Plato, in his inverted fashion, realizes that the Orphic life was a revival of things primitive. In speaking of the golden days before the altars of the gods were stained with blood, when men offered honey cakes and fruits of the earth, he says then it was not holy to eat or offer flesh-food, but men lived a sort of 'Orphic' life, as it is called.

Poets and philosophers, then as now, sated and hampered by the complexities and ugliness of luxury, looked back with longing eyes to the old beautiful gentle simplicity, the picture of which was still before their eyes in antique ritual, in the ocna, the rites of the underworld gods those gods who in their beautiful conservatism kept their service cleaner and simpler than the lives of their worshippers. Sophocles' in the lost Polyidos tells of the sacrifice 'dear to these gods':

'Wool of the sheep was there, fruit of the vine,
Libations and the treasured store of grapes.
And manifold fruits were there, mingled with grain
And oil of olive, and fair curious combs
Of wax compacted by the yellow bee.'

Some of these gods, it has been seen, would not taste of the fruit of the vine: such were at Athens the Sun, the Moon, the Dawn, the Muses, the Nymphs, Mnemosyne and Ourania. To them the Athenians, who were careful in matters of religion, brought only sober offerings, nephalia; and such an offering we have seen was brought to Dionysos-Hades. Philochoros, to our great surprise, extends the list of wineless divinities to Dionysos. Plutarch knows the custom of the wineless libation to Dionysos, and after the fashion of his day explains it as an ascetic protest. In his treatise on the Preservation of Health' he says, 'We often sacrifice nephalia to Dionysos, accustoming ourselves rightly not to desire unmixed wine.' The practice is manifestly a survival in ritual of the old days before Dionysos took possession of the vine, or rather the vine took possession of him. Empedokles had taught men that'to fast from evil 'was a great and divine thing; it is not surprising that the'wineless' rites became to those who lived the Orphic life the symbol, perhaps the sacrament, of their spiritual abstinence. Plutarch we know was suspected by his robuster friends of Orphism, and probably with good reason. In his dialogue on 'Freedom from Anger' he makes one of the speakers, who is transparently himself, tell how he conquered his natural irritability. He set himself to observe certain days as sacred, on which he would not get angry, just as he might have abstained from getting drunk or taking any wine, and these 'angerless days' he offered to God as 'Nephalia' or 'Melisponda,' and then he tried a whole mouth, and then two, till he was cured. To a greater than Plutarch, a priest who was poet also, the wineless sacrifice of the Eumenides is charged with sacramental meaning; the rage of the king is over, in his heart is meekness, in his hands olive, shorn wool, water and honey; so only may he enter their sanctuary, he sober and they wineless.'

!ln the confession of the Orphic there is no mention of wine, no avowal of having sacramentally drunk it, no resolve to abstain. The Bacchos, with whom the mystic is made one, is the ancient Bull-god, lord of the life of Nature, rather than Bromios, god of intoxication. Also it must not be forgotten that the mystic is a votary of the Mother as well as the Son, and though the Mother is caught and carried away in the later revels of the Son, she is never goddess of the vine. It is noteworthy that the later Orphics turned rather to the Mother than the Son; they revived the ancient rite of earth to earth burial, supplanted for a time by cremation, and the house of Pythagoras was called by the people of Metapontum the 'temple of Demeter.' Pythagoras never insisted on 'total abstinence,' but he told his disciples that if they would drink plain water they would be clearer in head as well as healthier in body. In the ancient rites of the Mother, rites instituted before the coming of the grape, they found the needful divine precedent:

'Then Metaneira brought her a cup of honey-sweet wine,
But the goddess would not drink it, she shook her head for a sign,
For red wine she might not taste, and she bade them bring her meal
And water and mix it together, and mint that is soft to feel.
Metaneira did her bidding and straight the posset she dight,
And holy Deo took it and drank thereof for a rite.'

It is strange that Orpheus if he came from the North, the land of Homeric banquets, should have preached abstinence from flesh: if he was of Cretan origin the difficulty disappears. Perhaps also such abstinence is a necessary concomitant of a mysticism that asks for nothing short of divinity. The mystic Porphyry says clearly that his treatise on 'Abstinence from Animal Food' is not meant for soldiers or for athletes; for these flesh food may be needful. He writes for those who would lay aside every weight and 'entering the stadium naked and unclothed would strive in the Olympic contest of the soul.' And a great modern mystic, looking more deeply and more humbly into the mystery of things natural, writes as follows:

'Toute noire justice, toute notre morale, tons nos sentiments et toutes nos pensees derivent en somme de trois ou quatre besoins primordiaux, dont le principal est celui de la nourriture. La moindre modification de Vun de ces besoins amenerait des changements considerables dans notre vie morale! Maeterlinck believes, as Pythagoras did, that those who abstain from flesh food'ont senti leurs forces saccroitre, leur sante se retablir ou s'affermir, leur esprit Colleger et se purifier, comme au sortir dune prison seculaire nauseabonde et miserable!

But the plain carnal man in ancient Athens would have none of this. What to him are ocria, things hallowed to the god, as compared with voifia, things consecrated by his own usage? So Demosthenes taunts Aeschines, because he cries aloud 'Bad have I fled, better have I found'; so Theseus, the bluff warrior, hates Hippolytos, not only, or perhaps not chiefly, because he believes him to be a sinner, but because he is an Orphic, righteous overmuch. All his rage of flesh and blood breaks out against the prig and the ascetic.

'Now is thy day! Now vaunt thee; thou so pure,
No flesh of life may pass thy lips! Now lure
Fools after thee; call Orpheus King and Lord,
Make ecstasies and wonders! Thumb thine hoard
Of ancient scrolls and ghostly mysteries.
Now thou art caught and known. Shun men like these,
I charge ye all! With solemn words they chase
Their prey, and in their hearts plot foul disgrace.'

Happily there were in Athens also those who did not hate but simply laughed, laughed aloud genially and healthily at the outward absurdities of the thing, at all the mummery and hocus-pocus to which the lower sort of Orphic gave such solemn intent; Among these ge'nial scoffers was Aristophanes.

There is no more kindly and delightful piece of fooling than the scene in the Clouds in which he deliberately and in detail parodies the Orphic mysteries. The tension of Orphism is great; it is, like all mysticisms, a state of mind intrinsically and necessarily transient, and we can well imagine that, in his lighter moods, the most pious of Orphics might have been glad to join the general fun. In any case it helps us to realize vividly both the mise-en-scene of the mysteries themselves and the attitude of the popular mind towards them. Exactly what particular rite is selected for parody we do not know; probably some lesser mystery of purification, for there is no allusion to the supreme sacramental feast of bull's flesh nor to the idea that the neophyte is made one with the god.

The old unhappy father Strepsiades comes to the 'Thinking-Shop' of Sokrates that he may learn to evade his creditors by dexterity of speech and new-fangled sophistries in general. A disciple opens the door, with reluctance and warns Strepsiades that he cannot reveal these 'mysteries' to the chance comer Strepsiades enters and sees a number of other disciples lost in the contemplation of earth and heaven. He calls for Sokrates and is answered by a voice up in the air.

Why dost thou call me, Creature of a Day?
Str. First tell me please, what are you doing up there ?
Sok. I walk in air and contemplate the Sun.'

Here is the first Orphic touch. Sokrates instead of climbing a mountain has taken an easier way: he is suspended in a basket, and, Orpheus-like, reveres the Sun. The mysteries are not Eleusinian, not of the underworld. The comedian might and did dare to bring the Mystics of Kore and lacchos in Hades on the stage, but a direct parody of the actual ceremony of initiation at Eleusis would scarcely have been tolerated by orthodox Athens. The Eleusinian rites had become by that time a state religion, politically and socially sacred. The Orphics were Dissenters, and a parody of Orphic mysteries was an appeal at once to popular prejudice and popular humour. Sokrates explains that he is sitting aloft to avoid the intermixture of earthly elements in his contemplation; again we have a skit on the Orphic doctrine of the double nature of man, earthly and heavenly, and the need , for purification from earthly Titanic admixture.

After some preliminary nonsense Strepsiades tells his need, and Sokrates descends and asks:

'Now, would you fain
Know clearly of divine affairs, their nature
When rightly apprehended?
Str. Yes, if I may.
Sok. And would you share the converse of the Clouds,
The spiritual beings we worship?
Str. Why, yes, rather.
Sok. Then take your seat upon this sacred campstool.
Str. All right, I'm here.
Sok. And now, take you this wreath.
Str. A wreath what for ? Oh mercy, Sokrates,
Don't sacrifice me, I'm not Athamas !
Sok. No, no. I'm only doing just the things
We do at initiations.'

Strepsiades is of the old order; he knows nothing of these new ''spiritual beings' worshipped by Orphics and sophists. Something religious and uncomfortable is going to be done to him, and his thoughts instinctively revert to the old order. A wreath suggests a sacrificial victim,, and the typical victim is Athamas. Sokrates at once corrects him, and puts the audience on the right scent. It is not a common old-world sacrifice; it is an initiation 'into a new-fangled rite, in which, it would appear the mystic was crowned, probably by way of consecration to the gods. Strepsiades is not clear about the use of such things:

I Str. Well, what good
Shall I get out of it?

Sok. Why, just this, you'll be
A floury knave, uttering fine flowers of speech.
Now just keep still.

Str. By Jove, be sure you do it,
Come flour me well, I'll be a flowery knave.'

If any doubt were possible as to the nature of the ceremonies parodied, the words translated 'flour' to preserve the pun, settle the matter. The word rpia means something rubbed, pounded; the noise made in rubbing and founding; it might be rendered 'rattle.' Strepsiades is too become subtle in his arguments, a rattle in his speech. The words would have no sort of point but for the fact that Sokrates at the moment takes up two pieces of gypsum, pounds them to together and bespatters Strepsiades till he is white all over like a Cretan mystic. The scholiast is quite clear as to what was done on the stage.' Sokrates while speaking rubs together two friable stones, and beating them against each other collects the splinters and pelts the old man with them, as they pelt the victims with grain. He is quite right as to the thing done, quite wrong as to the ritual imitated. Strepsiades, as Sokrates said, is not being sacrificed; it is not the ritual of sacrifice that is mimicked, but of initiation.

The certainty that the scene is one of initiation, not sacrifice, is made more certain by the fact that Strepsiades is sitting all the while, not on an altar, but on a sort of truckle-bed or camp-stool. We have no evidence of the use of this in mystic ritual, but it is clearly the comic equivalent of the seat or throne used in Orphic rites. The candidate for initiation, whether Eleusinian or Orphic, was always seated, and the ceremony was known as the'seating'or enthronement. Dion Chrysostom says those who perform initiation ceremonies are wont in the ceremony called 'the seating' to make the candidates sit down and to dance round them. It is to this ceremonial that Plato alludes in the Euthydemus. 'You don't see, Kleinias, that the two strangers are doing what the officials in the rites of the Korybantes are wont to do, when they perform the ceremony of "seating" for the man who is about to be initiated.' Kleinias is undergoing instruction like the neophyte in the mysteries; he has to sit in silence while his instructors dance argumentatively round him, uttering what seem to him unmeaning words.

Aristophanes on Orphism

So far Strepsiades is a mystic in the first stage of initiation, i.e. he is being prepared and purified. All this ceremonial is preliminary to the next stage, that of full vision. He is seated on the stool, he is covered with chalk, to one end only, and that is that he may behold clearly, may hold communion with, the heavenly gods. Sokrates, in regular ritual fashion, first proclaims the sacred silence, then makes preliminary prayer to the sophistic quasi-Orphic divinities of Atmosphere and Ether, and finally invokes the Holy Clouds in pseudo-solemn ritual fashion:

'Sok. Silence the aged man must keep, until our prayer be ended.
Atmosphere unlimited, who keepst our earth suspended,
Bright Ether and ye Holy Clouds, who send the storm and thunder,
Arise, appear above his head, a Thinker waits in wonder.

Str. Wait, please, I must put on some things before the rain has drowned me,
I left at home my leather cap and macintosh, confound me.

Sok. Come, come! Bring to this man full revelation.
Come, come! Whether aloft ye hold your station
On Olympus'holy summits, smitten of storm and snow,
Or in the Father's gardens, Okeanos, down below,
Ye weave your sacred dance, or ye draw with your pitchers gold
Draughts from the fount of Nile, or if perchance ye hold
Maiotis mere in ward, or the steep Mimantian height,
Snow-capped, hearken, we pray, vouchsafe to accept our rite
And in our holy meed of sacrifice take delight.'

The address is after the regular ritual pattern, which mentions, for safety's sake, any and every place where the divine beings are likely to wander. That such an invocation formed part of Orphic-Dionysiac rites is not only a priori probable but certain from the lacchos song in the Frogs. In a word the 'full revelation,' of these and all mysteries, was only an intensification, a mysticizing, of the old Epiphany rites the 'Appear, appear' of the Bacchants, the 'summoning' of the Bull-god by the women of Elis. It was this Epiphany, outward and inward, that was the goal of all purification, of all consecration, not the enunciation or elucidation of arcane dogma, but the revelation, the fruition, of the god himself. To what extent these Epiphanies were actualized by pantomimic performances we do not know; that some form of mimetic representation was enacted seems probable from the scene that follows the Epiphany of the Clouds, when Strepsiades confused and amazed gropes in bewilderment, and bit by bit attains clear vision of the goddesses.

That the new divinities are goddesses is as near as Aristophanes dare go to a skit on Eleusinian rites; that they are goddesses of the powers of the air, not dread underworld divinities, saves him from all scandal as regards his Established Church. He guards himself still further by making his Clouds, in one of their lovely little songs, chant the piety of Athens, home of the mysteries.

The Clouds themselves were as safe as they were poetical. Even the Orphics did not actually worship clouds; but their theogony, their cosmogony, is, as will later be seen, full of vague nature-impersonations, of air and ether and Erebos and Chaos, and the whirlpool of things unborn. No happier incarnation of all this, this and the vague confused cosmical philosophy it embodied, than the shifting wonder of mists and clouds.

The scene, though it goes on far too long, must have been exquisitely comic. With no stage directions probably half the trivial and absurd details have been lost, but we can imagine that the whole hocus-pocus of an Orphic mystery was carefully mimicked. We can even imagine that Sokrates was dressed up as an initiating Silen, such a one as is depicted in the relief in fig. 149.

We can also imagine that in Athens it was hard to be an Orphic, a dissenter, a prig, a man overmuch concerned about his own soul. We have seen how against such eccentrics the advocate Demosthenes could appeal to the prejudices of a jury. We know that to Theophrastos it was the characteristic of a 'superstitious man' that he went every month to the priest of the Orphic mysteries to participate in these rites, and we gather dimly that he did not always find sympathy at home; his wife was sometimes 'too busy' to go with him, and he had to take the nurse and children.

Plutarch, sympathetic as he is to some aspects of Orphism, yet, in his protest against superstition, says, 'these are the sort of things that make men atheists, the incantations, wavings and enchantments and magic, runnings round and tabourings, unclean purifications, filthy cleansings, barbarous and outrageous penances in sanctuaries, and bemirings.' And again, when he is describing the hapless plight of the man who thinks that affliction comes to him as a punishment for sin,' It is useless to speak to him, to try and help him. He sits girt about with foul rags, and many a time he strips himself and rolls about naked in the nude; he accuses himself of sins of omission and commission, he has eaten something or drunk something or walked in some road the divinity forbade him. This morbid habit of self-examination is a thoroughly Orphic trait. Pythagoras advised his disciples to repeat these lines to themselves when they went home at night:

'What have I done amiss? what of right accomplished?
What that I ought to have done have I omitted to do?'

'When he is at his best,' Plutarch goes on, 'and has only a slight attack of superstition on him he will sit at home, becensed and bespattered, with a parcel of old women round him, hanging all sorts of odds and ends on him as though, as Bion says, he were a peg. Such rites as those described by Plutarch were not late decadent inventions, though we hear of them mainly from late authors; they were primitive savageries revived with new spiritual meaning by the Orphics. Herakleitos refers to them: 'polluted they are purified with blood, as though if a man stepped into mud he should be purified by mud.

This is the shady side of Orphism, the way it had of attaching to itself ancient, obscure and even degraded rites, the more obscure the easier to mysticize. It was this shady side that Plato hated, against which he protested. In the Republic he says'seers and mendicant quacks besiege rich men's doors, exhibiting books by Musaeus and Orpheus and in accordance with these they perform sacrifices, inducing not only individual persons but whole cities to believe that you can obtain freedom and purification from sins, while you are still alive, by sacrifices and performances that might please a child, and that there are things they call "rites," which will release us from suffering after we are dead, and that if we do not perform them, then there are fearful things in store for us. The Orphics, alas, fell before the temptation, always assailing the theologist, to enforce his moral and religious precepts by the terrors of another world; there can be little doubt that the lower class of Orphic priest in some fashion sold indulgences. The fearful things with which the uninitiated were threatened, will be discussed when we come to the question of Orphic eschatology.

The Liknophoria

The tearing of the bull is, however mysticized, a savage orgy; the purification by mud and clay can never have been pleasing. It is a relief to turn to another Orphic ceremonial of more genial content the Liknophoria, the carrying of the liknon.

In discussing the worship of Dionysos Liknites at Delphi, a worship attended, it will be remembered, by a secret sacrifice performed by priests who bore the specially Orphic name of Hosioi, Holy Ones, we have seen the liknon in use as a cradle for the infant god. It will further be noted that Dionysos Liknites is, like the infant Ploutos in the cornucopia, only an anthropomorphic presentation of the new-born fruits of the earth, of the fruits whether of spring or autumn; he is a male form of Kore the earth-daughter. The ceremony of'waking'him was primarily but a mimetic summons to the earth to bring forth her fruits in due season.

On the relief in fig. 148 in the Glyptothek at Munich we see a shovel-shaped liknon, of a shape that might well serve for a cradle; but it contains not a child, only grapes and leaves, and the phallic symbol of animal life.

The relief, of Hellenistic date, represents a peasant going to market; he carries fruits and some animal slung on a stick over his shoulder, and he drives in front of him a cow with her calf tied on to her.

He is passing a sanctuary of Dionysos; a wine cup and torches and a thyrsos are seen to the left. Up above is a second little shrine with a Herm, whether of Hermes or Dionysos it is impossible to say.

High in the middle of the main building is an elaborate erection, on the top of which is set up the sacred liknon.

We are at once reminded of a fragment of Sophocles:

'Go on your road,
All ye the folk of handicraft who pray
To Ergane, your bright-eyed child of Zeus,
With service of your posted winnow-corbs.'

The passage is of interest because it shows that the liknon, the harvest basket, though undoubtedly used in the cult of Dionysos, was nowise confined to him. Athene Ergane, goddess at first no doubt of 'works' in the Hesiodic sense, of tilth rather than of weaving and handicraft, was, as has been previously shown, only another Kore, the local Earth-daughter of Athens. To her rather than to the work-fellow of Hephaistos, the liknon full of fruits was a fit offering, and in solemn consecration it was set up, erected, as on the relief. The word 'erected' is used no doubt to mark the contrast with other ceremonies of the carrying of the liknon (Liknophoria).

This setting up of the liknon was too open and public a matter to be a mystery. It was a mere offering of first-fruits whether to Athene or Kore or Liknites. But in the service of Liknites there was an element of mystery, the birth of the divine child, and it is largely in connection with the cult of Dionysos that the liknon takes on mystic developments. It is an excellent instance of determined Orphic mysticizing.

In the relief reproduced in fig. 149 we have what is manifestly a Dionysiac mystery. The neophyte is in the act of being veiled; he may not look at the liknon, with its fruit and sacred symbol, which will presently be placed upon his head. A satyr holds it in readiness, and behind the neophyte is a Maenad with her cymbal.

The veiling of the head marks the mysterious character of the ceremony. We see it again in the delicate piece of stucco-work from the Farnesina palace reproduced in fig. 150, and now in the Museo delle Therme at Rome. The scene is clearly one of initiation; the thyrsos carried by the boy with head closely veiled marks it as a mystery of Dionysos. A priest is unveiling an object on what seems to be an altar. Unfortunately the stucco is much damaged and what the object is cannot be certainly made out; it looks like a liknon in shape. In any case the ceremony of veiling at a Dionysiac mystery is clear. Behind the officiating priestess is a cista, containing no doubt the further sacra of the rite. The scene takes place in a sanctuary, indicated by a column and a sacred tree.

The custom of veiling survives for us in the ritual veil of the bride and the widow, but we have almost emptied it of its solemn ancient content. The bride veils herself, it is usually supposed, out of modesty. It is therefore with some surprise we learn that in the primitive church bridegroom as well as bride were veiled. This custom, according to the Abbe Duchesne, obtained till quite recently in France and still obtains in the Armenian Church. At the actual moment of the ceremony, apparently as an integral part of it, the priest spreads over bride and groom together a long red veil, the flammeum of the Romans. In the Coptic ritual the veil is white, but is spread alike over man and woman.

The real symbolism of the veil, which indicates neither modesty nor chastity, comes out when we examine classical usage. The question was raised long ago by Plutarch 'Why do men veil their heads when they worship the gods and uncover them when they wish to do honour to men?' Plutarch is better at asking questions than at answering them, but, among the various odd solutions he propounds, he gives one suggestive clue, viz. that the custom was analogous to those of the Pythagoreans. Pythagorean, as we have seen, spells Orphic revival of primitive usage.

The real reason of the custom comes out in the ceremonial known as the Sacred Spring (ver sacrum), which Festus describes as follows: 'The Sacred Spring was a rite of dedication among the Italians. Under the pressure of extreme disasters they used to make a vow that they would sacrifice all animal things born to them in the spring next ensuing. But as it seemed to them a barbarous thing to slay innocent boys and girls, when they came to adult years they veiled them and drove them out beyond the boundaries of their state. Whether the horrid practice of the 'Sacred Spring' is real or imaginary, does not for our purpose greatly matter. One thing is clear: the practice of veiling symbolized, was the equivalent of, dedication. The I bride and bridegroom alike are veiled because they are dedicated in the mystery of marriage, consecrated, made over to the powers of life. The penitent is veiled because he dedicates himself as atonement for sin; the widow is made over to the powers of death, primarily no doubt as a substitute for her sacrifice, her devotion of herself to the ghost of her dead husband. Alcestis when she returns to the upper air is veiled and silent, and must so remain for the space of three days; she is consecrate to Hades:

'Thou mayst not hear sound of her spoken words
Till she be disenhallowed from the gods
Of the nether earth and see the third day's light.'

The old meaning of devotion to the gods survives now-a-days only in the beautiful ceremonial of the Roman Church, known in popular parlance as'taking the veil,'and even here its dread significance has been softened down by the symbolism of a mystic marriage; the devotion for life is blended with the'devotion for death.

In fig. 148 the liknon has been set up on high, in open evidence; it contains simply an offering of first-fruits with the added symbol of the phallos; it is sacred, but nowise mysterious. It forms in this particular monument a part of the worship of Dionysos, but it might belong, as already noted, equally well to any and every god or goddess of harvest to whom first-fruits were due. In figs. 149 and 150 the liknon has become part of a mystery cult; it is about to be put on the head of the worshipper: he is veiled and may not look upon it. What are the elements of mystery and how were they imported?

In discussing the religion of Dionysos it has been seen that, at Delphi, he was worshipped as Liknites. Hesychius thus explains the title:'Liknites, a name of Dionysos, from the cradle in which they put children to sleep.' The liknon, the shovel-shaped basket used for the carrying of fruits, served in primitive days another purpose, that of cradle for a child.

On the vase-painting in fig. 151, from a red-figured cylix in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, we see the wicker-work liknon in use as a cradle.

The baby Hermes, wearing his broad petasos, sitting up in his liknon looking at the oxen he has just stolen. One of them turns round surprised at the strange little object he sees, and gently snuffs the cradle. Maia, the mother of Hermes, comes up' in consternation and holds out a protesting hand.

It is the scene described in the Homeric hymn, though, as usual, the vase-painter is independent in matters of detail:

'Straightway did goodly Hermes back to his cradle hie,
And round his shoulders pulled the clothes, as when a babe doth lie
All snug and warm in swaddling bands. And for he loved it well
Tight in his left hand held he his lyre of tortoise-shell.'

The Thyiades, as has been noted, awakened the child Liknites. Of the actual ceremony of'awakening'ancient art has left us no record; but on a sarcophagus in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge (fig. 152) we have a scene depicted that looks like a reminiscence of some such ceremonial.

On the front face of the sarcophagus is represented the triumphant procession of Bacchos; at one of the ends is the scene of the carrying of the infant god. The two men, one bearded, the other youthful, grasp the liknon by its convenient handles, and emerge hurriedly from behind a curtain slung between two trees. The curtain and the flaming torches point to a mystery scene enacted by night.

Nothing certain is known of the details of the ceremony, but it may be conjectured that at a given signal the birth of the sacred child was announced, and the attendants issued from behind a screen of some kind, bearing the child in a liknon.

The vase-painting in fig. 153 from a hydria in the Museum at Constantinople offers a close analogy to Liknites, the child in the cradle, and throws instant light on his primitive significance. The vase is of somewhat late style, about the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., the drawing only indifferent, but the subject-matter all important.

The scene is at Eleusis. Of that we are sure, because Triptolemos is present with his winged car and the corn-ears he is about to carry through the world. The side figures in the top row of vases of this class are always subordinate, usually difficult of interpretation. The figure in the left-hand corner is Aphrodite, by this time tediously omnipresent. The group to the right cannot certainly be named, but the seated woman is known to be a priestess from the great temple-key she holds over her right shoulder. On the lower row the interpretation of the central group is certain. Ge rises from the ground, watched by two goddesses; one to the right bears a gold lance; she is obviously Athene. The group to the left, of two women, one holding a torch, represents Kore and Demeter.

The scene represented is clearly the birth of a divine child at Eleusis. The birth of such a child was, as will later be seen, proclaimed by the hierophant at some moment during the celebration of the Mysteries: 'Brimo has borne a child Brimos' but such a mystery would scarcely be represented openly on a vase-painting. A simpler name lies to hand. The child rises out of a cornucopia, symbol of fertility. He is the fruits of the earth. He is solemnly presented to Athene because Eleusis gave to Athens her corn and her mysteries. Art could speak no plainer. On vases representing Eleusinian scenes, e.g. the sending forth of Triptolemos, Plouton, who is none other than Ploutos, Wealth, is represented as an aged man, white-haired, carrying a cornucopia full of fruits; but here we have the young Ploutos, the babe who is wealth itself. In like fashion the liknon is either a basket for fruits or a cradle for a child. It is all the same beautiful symbolism that refuses coldly to discriminate between the human and the natural, that sees in marriage the plough, in man the sower, in earth the mother, and in the fruits of the earth the new-born child.

When we realize that the liknon is, as it were, a cornucopia that for human fruit becomes a cradle, we naturally expect that, in its mystical sense, it will be a symbol of new birth, that Liknites will be connected with a doctrine of paling enesia, a sort of spiritual resurrection. The Orphics had their doctrine of palingenesia, but the symbolism of the liknon was to them mainly of purification, to which they added that of rebirth. The history of how this came to be is a curious and instructive chapter in the development of primitive mysticism.

The locus classicus on the liknon is the commentary of Servius on Vergil's words in the first Georgic, where among the stock implements of Demeter he notes the mystica vannus lacchi. So confused and confusing is the commentary that it has gone far to make the liknon or vannus mysterious.

Virgil first enumerates all the heavy agricultural implements: the ploughshare's heavy strength, the slow rolling waggons, the irksome weight of the mattock, and next he notes

'Slight wares entwined of wicker work that Celeus made for man, Frames of arbutus wood compact, lacchus'mystic fan.'

If we were left with Virgil only we should conclude that the fan was a fan, i.e. a thing with which to cause wind, to ventilate and, as it was an instrument of Demeter, we should further suppose that this fan was used for ventilating, for winnowing her corn. We should still be left with two unanswered questions:

(1) 'why was a winnowing fan, a thing in constant use in everyday life, "mystic"?' and

(2) 'how had the winnowing fan of the corn-goddess become the characteristic implement of the wine-god?' These two difficulties presented themselves to the mind of Servius, and he attempts to answer them after his kind. He does not fairly face the problem, but he tells us everything he can remember that anybody has said about or around the matter. His confused statement is so instructive it must be quoted in full:

'The mystic fan of lacchus, that is the sieve (cribrum) of the threshing-floor. He calls it the mystic fan of lacchus, because the rites of Father Liber had reference to the purification of the soul, and men were purified through his mysteries as grain is purified by fans. It is because of this that Isis is said to have placed the limbs of Osiris, when they had been torn to pieces by Typhon, on a sieve, for Father Liber is the same person, he in whose mysteries the fan plays a part, because as we said he purifies souls. Whence also he is called Liber, because he liberates, and it is he who, Orpheus said, was torn asunder by the Giants. Some add that Father Liber was called by the Greeks Liknites. Moreover the fan is called by them liknon, in which he is said to have been placed directly after he was born from his mother's womb. Others explain its being called mystic'by saying that the fan is a large wicker vessel in which peasants, because it is of large size, are wont to heap their first-fruits and consecrate it to Liber and Libera. Hence it is called "mystic".'

If by 'mystic' is meant hopelessly and utterly unintelligible, the fan of lacchos certainly justifies its name. Servius leaves us with a 'vannus' that is at once a sieve, a winnowing fan and a fruit basket, with mysterious contents that are at once a purified soul, an infant and a dismembered Dionysos, leaves us also with no clue to any possible common factor that might explain all three uses and their symbolism.

To solve the problems presented by Servius it is necessary briefly to examine the evidence of classical authors as to the process of winnowing and the shape of winnowing fans. So far we have assumed that a winnowing fan is a basket, but when we turn to Homer we are confronted by an obvious difficulty.

It happens by an odd chance that we know something of the shape of the instrument for winnowing used in Homeric days. It was a thing so shaped that by a casual observer it could be mistaken for an oar. Teiresias in Hades foretells to Odysseus what shall befall him after the slaying of the suitors: he is to go his way carrying with him a shapen oar, until he comes to a land where men have no knowledge of sea-things, and a sign shall be given to him where he is to abide. Teiresias thus instructs him:

'This token manifest I give, another wayfarer

Shall meet thee and shall say, on thy stout shoulder thou dost bear A winnowing fan, that day in earth plant thou thy shapen oar And to Poseidon sacrifice a bull, a ram, a boar.'

The word used is not liknon; it is chaff-destroyer, but none the less it is clear that the ancient instrument of winnowing was, roughly speaking, shaped like an oar; confusion between the two was possible. Such an instrument might well be called a fan, and of some such shape must have been the primitive winnower. It is obviously quite a different thing from the liknon of the reliefs, the fruit basket. A thing shaped like an oar would not be easily carried on the head, nor would it suggest itself as a convenient cradle for a baby.

The way in which this primitive winnowing fan was used is clear from another Homeric passage. In the fray of battle the Achaeans are white with falling dust, just as

'When in the holy threshing floors away the wind doth bear
The chaff, when men are winnowing. She of the golden hair
Demeter with the rushing winds the husk from out the grain
Divideth, and the chaff-heaps whiten and grow amain.'

The wind is the natural winnower, but man can help the wind by exposing the mixed chaff and grain. This he throws up on the winnowing fan against the wind, the wind blows away the chaff and the heavier grain falls to the ground. The best instrument with which to do this is naturally an oar-like pole, broadened at the end to serve as a shovel. Such an instrument was the winnowing fan:

'As when from a broad winnowing fan, in a great threshing floor,
The pulse and black-skinned beans leap out the whistling wind before
Sped by the winnower's swinging, so the bitter arrow flew
From Menelaos glancing far nor pierced his corslet through.'

Here the joint work of the wind and the human winnower is clearly shown.

A basket of the shape of an old-fashioned coal-scuttle could be used to scoop up the grain and toss it against the wind. It would not be so convenient as the oar-shaped winnowing fan, because the labourer would have to stoop to shovel up the grain, but it would hold more grain and would serve the second purpose of an ordinary basket and of a child's cradle. Primitive man is not averse to these economies.

The liknon and the vannus alike begin as winnowing fans and as baskets for corn or fruit. The liknon of the Hellenistic reliefs and the vannm of Virgil are made of wicker-work; the 'fan of Homer shaped like an oar was made of sterner stuff, probably of wood. This may be gathered from a pathetic fragment of the Proteus of Aeschylus where some one tells of

'The piteous dove who feeding beats and breaks
Her hapless breast amid the winnowing fans.'

The winnowing fan is essentially and necessarily an instrument of Demeter. This Virgil knew, though he knew also that it had passed into the service of lacchos. Theocritus at the end of his harvest Idyll prays

'0 once again may it be mine to plant
The great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands
Smiling, with sheaves and poppies in her hands.'

The 'great fan' here, as the word 'plant' shows, must have been the oar-shaped fan, not the basket. The basket, the light thing of osier carried on the head, is mainly characteristic of Dionysos. An epigram in the Anthology enumerates the various instruments of the worship of Bacchus, the rhombos, the fawn-skin, the cymbals, the thyrsos, and

'The timbrel lightly carried with its deep and muttering sound,
The liknon often borne aloft on hair with fillet bound.'

We have then, it is clear, two implements in use in ancient days for winnowing; distinct in shape and made of different materials. The 'chaff-consumer' of Homer, called also a ptuon, made of wood and later of iron, is an oar-shaped implement with a long handle; the liknon proper, the vannus of Vergil, is a shovel-shaped basket made of wicker work. The only factor common to the two is that they are both winnowers. There the resemblance ends. The ptuon remained a simple agricultural tool, the liknon, the winnow-corb, became 'mystic' because of its function as a purifier and because of its second use as a cradle for the mystery-babe. In it was carried the phallos, the symbol of life; hence it was reverently veiled. The confusion between the two is entirely caused by our modern terminology, which uses the word 'fan' to translate both 'winnow-corb,' and 'winuow-fork' or 'shovel.'The religion of Dionysos, and with it the Orphic mysteries, adopted the liknon, the winnow-corb, and left the ptuon, the winnow-shovel, to Demeter.

The diverse shapes of the liknon have been discussed at length because they are of vital importance for the understanding of Orphic mysteries and Orphic mysticism. The shift from winnowing fan to fruit basket marks the transition from agriculture to vine culture, from Demeter to Bacchus, and the connecting link is Bromios. The vine-growers have no use for the winnowing fork but they were once grain-growers, and they keep the liknon-basket in their worship.

Moreover, and this is the most curious and conclusive evidence, though they have turned their winnowing fans into fruit-baskets, they by an instructive and half unconscious confusion take over from the winnowing fan its proper symbolism and apply it to the fruit-basket.

I The winnowing fan symbolized purification; as the husk is separated from the grain so is evil winnowed away from good; it mattered little whether the separation was effected by an actual fan or by a sieve. Plato, whose mind was charged with Orphism, knew that all purification is discernment, separation, from the outward cleansing of the body to that innermost purification which is 'the purging away by refutation of all prejudice and vain conceit within the soul.'We have kept among our sacraments the outward washing with water, but we have lost the lovely and more intimate symbolism of the liknon. Yet we still remember that' his fan is in his hand and he will throughly purge his floor.'

The symbolism of the basket of first-fruits was quite other; it was the sign of plenty, of new life, of the birth of fruits and children. But the Orphic cannot forget purification; his fusion of new and old is at the back of all his confused mysticism that baffled Servius. The fan he knows symbolizes purification, but the basket is the cradle of the new-born Liknites. He sees in a flash how he can connect the two. Was not the child torn asunder? is it not that divine dismembered life by which all men are purged and consecrated and born anew? It even seems to him full of a wondrous significance that this divine dismembered life should be carried on the head, the seat of the divine reason, and he invents a story of a nymph, with an old Satyr name, Hippa, who carried the liknon on her head and symbolized the soul. Charged with all this symbolism we cannot wonder that the liknon as fan for winnowing, as sieve for sifting, as basket for first-fruits, as cradle for a child, was, as Harpocration tells,'serviceable for every rite of initiation, for every sacrifice.

The rite in which the liknon was used, and that a rite of supreme importance for the understanding of Orphic mysteries, has been reserved to the end the rite of marriage.

On the engraved. gem in fig. 154, signed by the artist Tryphon, the scene represented is the marriage, or possibly the initiation and marriage ceremonies in one, of Eros and Psyche. The subject is of course mythological, but none the less is it a transcript of actual usage. Eros and Psyche, both closely veiled, are led by a sacred fillet in the hand of the Eros who bears the nuptial torch. Another Eros to the right unveils a seat or couch. Over the veiled heads of bride and groom a third Eros holds the liknon full of fruits.

That the liknon was carried at marriage ceremonies is known also from literary sources. Plutarch says it was the custom at Athens at marriages that a boy both whose parents were alive should carry a liknon full of loaves and then pronounce the words 'Bad have I fled, better have I found.'The fact that the boy must have both parents alive, i.e. that he should be uncontaminated by any contact however remote with the unlucky spirits and influences of the dead, shows clearly that here again the carrying of the liknon was a fertility charm, a charm to induce the birth of children and all natural wealth and increase. In a marriage rite the symbolism of Liknites, of fruit and child, could not be forgotten. The scholiast to Kallimachos says 'in old days they were wont to lull babies to sleep in likna as an omen for wealth and fruits, 'and Servius says, as already noted it was the custom to do this the moment the child was born.

But the liknon in the marriage rite became not merely a fertility charm but the symbol of spiritual grace. This is clear from the words of Suidas. The boy, he says, carried branches of acanthus and acorns as well as loaves. If Suidas is right, these ruder natural products were only present as being earlier first-fruits before man made loaves of corn, but Suidas says he carried them and pronounced the formulary signifying as in a riddle the change to what is better, for the wreath of oak and acanthus signified what was bad. It was this mysticizing of everyday things that irritated the plain man, that seemed to him at once foolish and pretentious; this it was that raised Demosthenes to his angry protest: 'You bid your mystics,' he says to Aeschines, 'when you have daubed them with mud and purified them with clay, say "Bad have I fled, better have I found," pluming yourself that no one has ever before uttered such words, you, 'he goes on,' who are kistophoros and liknophoros.'Had not every plain man pronounced the words at his marriage and meant by them increase of income and family?

The 'mystic fan of lacchos' was used in marriage rites. This brings us face to face with the question did Orphic mysteries include a mystic marriage? The Orphics worshipped, as has been seen, both Mother and Son; they mysticized the birth of the Son; did they look back before the birth and mysticize the marriage of the Mother? On a priori grounds we should expect they did. A religion based on the belief of possible union with the divine had everything to gain from the symbolism of marriage. Happily we are not left to a priori speculation; we have positive evidence that Dionysiac mysteries contained a sacred marriage and that Orphics mysticized it.

The Sacred Marriage

By a most unhappy chance our main evidence as to the Sacred Marriage of the mysteries comes to us from the Christian Fathers; their prejudiced imaginations see in its beautiful symbolism only the record of unbridled license. We may and must discredit their unclean interpretations, but we have no ground for doubting the substantial accuracy of their statements as to ritual procedure. They were preaching to men who had been initiated in the very mysteries they describe, and any mis-statement as to ritual would have discredited their teaching.

Clement in his 'Exhortation' wishes to prove the abominable wickedness of Zeus and says that he became the husband of his daughter in the form of a snake. He adds: 'The token of the Sabazian mysteries is the snake through the bosom, and this snake gliding through the bosom of the initiated is the proof of the license of Zeus.' Arnobius too holds that the ceremony of the snake is but a witness against Zeus. He adds the important detail that the snake was of gold. It was let down into the bosom and taken away from below. The gold snake is in itself evidence of the simple symbolic innocenceof the rite.

The snake ceremony of Sabazios is of course the relic of a very primitive faith, of the time when the snake was the god. We are reminded of the story told of Philip of Macedon and his fear that Olympias was the bride of a divine snake. As civilization advanced the sacred marriage would take a purely human form.

Clement again gives invaluable evidence. Happily he has preserved for us the symbols or tokens of initiation into the mysteries of the Great Mother in her Asiatic form as Cybele. 'The symbols,' he says, in his gross and ignorant blasphemy, 'will abundantly excite your laughter, though on account of the exposure you will not be in laughing condition: I have eaten from the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have carried the kernos, I have gone down into the bridal chamber.' The first three tokens are, as has been already shown, practically identical with the tokens of Eleusis and relate to the solemn partaking of first-fruits; the last is a manifest avowal of a Sacred Marriage. The word traotos here used means bridal chamber or bridal bed. It is roughly the equivalent of oaxallob, and like it had a hieratic as well as a secular use. The houses of the gods are built after the pattern of the dwellings of men.

It is curious and interesting to find that a tracrras, a bridal chamber, existed in the sanctuary of the Great Mother at Phlya. The anonymous author of the Philosophoumena or 'Refutation of all Heresies' tells us the Bacchic rites of Orpheus 'were established and given to men at Phlya in Attica before the establishment of the Eleusinian rite of initiation'. These rites were those of her called the Great One. At Phlya there was a bridal chamber and on the chamber were paintings, existing to the author's own time, representing the whole semblance of what has been described. On the subject of the many representations Plutarch wrote in his ten books against Empedokles. Unhappily the treatise by Plutarch is lost and the author of the Philosophoumena only describes one painting, which will be discussed later in relation to the theogony of Orpheus. At present it is important to note the one fact that in a primitive home of Orphism there was a sacred bridal chamber. In such a chamber must have been enacted a mimetic marriage.

Nor was it only at Phlya that a marriage chamber existed and a marriage ceremonial was enacted. At Athens itself was such a chamber, and our evidence for its existence is no less an authority than Aristotle. In his discussion of the official residences of the various archons he notes that in past days the King Archon used to live in a place called the Boukolion near to the Prytaneion, 'And the proof of this is that to this day the union and marriage of the wife of the King Archon with Dionysos takes place there.'

In a place called the'cattle shed'the Queen Archon was married to Dionysos. The conjecture lies near to hand that in bygone days there was a marriage to a sacred bull. We are reminded that the worshipper of Sabazios was said to 'herd' the god. Be that as it may, at the festival of the Anthesteria the Queen Archon was 'given in marriage' to Dionysos, and from the author of the Speech against Neaira we learn how dread and sacred was the rite.

The mother of Neaira, a base-born alien, had on behalf of the city performed the'unspeakable sacrifice'; she had seen what none but an Athenian woman might see; she had entered where none but the Queen Archon might enter; she had heard what none might hear; she had administered the oath to her celebrants, fourteen in number, one for each of the altars of Dionysos, administered it on the sacred baskets before they touched the holy things. The oath was written on a stone stele set up by the altar in the ancient sanctuary of Dionysos in the marshes, opened but once in the year at the festival of the marriage. It was set there in secret because it was too holy to be read by the many; the letters were dim with age; so the orator called for the sacred herald and bade him read it that the court might hear how 'holy and pure and ancient were its prescriptions.'

The Oath of the Celebrants

'I fasti and am clean and abstinent from all things that make unclean and from intercourse with man and I celebrate the Theoinia and the lobaccheia to Dionysos in accordance with ancestral usage and at the appointed times.'

Unhappily though we have the oath of purity we know nothing definite of either the Theoinia or the lobaccheia. Only this much is certain, a sacred marriage was enacted by a woman high-born and blameless, and that marriage was a mystery.

At Athens Dionysos is bridegroom, not new-born child. This is one of the shifts from Son to Father that constantly occur in Greek mythology. The Christian Fathers see in it evidence of incest, but the horrid supposition is wholly gratuitous. It has been shown in detail that the Mother and the Maid are two persons but one god, are but the young and the old form of a divinity always waxing and waning. It is the same with the Father and the Son; he is one but he reflects two stages of the same human life. We are perplexed because both Father and Son in the religion of Dionysos take on many names: Sabazios, Dionysos, Bacchos, lacchos, Zagreus. Each reflects some special function, but each is apt to be both Father and Son. The Romans in their dull way, with little power for intense personification, leave the simple truth more manifest. Libera the Mother has a Son Liber, a child, but even with them the inevitable confusion arises, the child Liber grows up and becomes 'Father Liber.'

Another bridal chamber in the cult of Dionysos remains to be noted, and one of special significance. On his way from Sekyon to Phlius Pausanias came to a grove called Pyraea. In it there was a sanctuary of Demeter the Protectress and of Kore. 'Here the men celebrate a festival by themselves, and they give up the place called the Bridal Chamber to the women for their festival. Of the images of Dionysos and Demeter and Kore in the Bridal Chamber the faces only are visible.' Here, as manifestly at Athens, the marriage service of Dionysos was accomplished by women; the men leave them alone with their god. If any one, Pentheus-like, charges these holy women with license, this plain primitive prescription refutes his impiety.

From the evidence of Aristotle and Pausanias we may be sure that the marriage rites, so grossly libelled by Christian Fathers, were not the products of their own imaginations. Their wilful misunderstanding is an ugly chapter in the history of human passion and prejudice. Now and again, when they seek an illustration for their own mysteries, they confess that the pagan mysteries of marriage were believed by the celebrants to be spiritual. Epiphanios says'some prepare a bridal chamber arid perform a mystic rite accompanied by certain words used to the initiated, and they allege that it is a spiritual marriage'; and Firmicus by a happy chance records the social formularies.' Not only words,'he says,'but even nuptial rites occur in their sacred mysteries, and the proof of this is the greeting in which the mystae hail those just initiated by the name of "brides":

"A light upon the shining sea
The Bridegroom and his Bride".'

A mimetic marriage was, it is clear, an element in the rites of Dionysos and an element mysticized by the Orphics. Equally clear is it that in the ceremony of waking Liknites and in the story of Zagreus we have as another element the birth of a child. At present we have no evidence of definite connection between the two. At Athens in the Boukolion we have a marriage rite but no birth rite, at Delphi in the waking of Liknites we have a birth but no marriage. When the mysteries at Eleusis are examined we find, as will shortly be seen, that the two rites the marriage and the birth were in close and manifest connection.

Orphic Elements In Eleusinian Ritual

The question may fairly be asked are we entitled to use evidence drawn from Eleusinian mysteries to elucidate Orphic ceremonial? or in other words have we any clear evidence that the worship of Dionysos in the form known as 'Orphic' came to Eleusis and modified the simple rites of the Mother and the Maid?

These simple rites have been already examined. It has been shown from the plain evidence of the Eleusinian 'tokens' that the rites of Eleusis were primarily rites of a harvest festival, that the ceremonies consisted of elaborate purification and fasting, followed by the removal of the taboo on first-fruits, and the consequent partaking of the sacred kykeon and the handling of certain sacred objects. I have advisedly devoted no separate chapter to the Eleusinian Mysteries because all in them that was not a primitive harvest festival, all or nearly all their spiritual significance, was due to elements borrowed from the cult of Dionysos. We have now obtained some notion, fairly clear if fragmentary, of the contents of Orphic and Dionysiac rites; we have examined the Omophagia of Crete, the Liknophoria of Delphi and the Sacred Marriage of Athens and Phlya, and we are able to begin the enquiry as to whether and how far these rites are part of the ritual of Eleusis.

Before attempting to answer this question it may be well to resume briefly the literary evidence for the affiliation of Dionysos to the Eleusinian goddesses. The actual fact of his presence at Eleusis must be established before we consider the extent and nature of his influence on Eleusinian rites.

Dionysos at Eleusis is known by the title of lacchos. The If locus classicus for lacchos of the mysteries is of course the chorus of the Mystae in the Frogs of Aristophanes:

CHORUS (unseen}.
lacchus, lacchus!
lacchus, O lacchus!

XANTHIAS.
That's it, sir. These are the Initiated
Rejoicing somewhere here, just as he told us.
Why, it's the old lacchus hymn that used
To warm the cockles of Diagoras !

DIONYSUS.
Yes, it must be. However, we'd best sit
Quite still and listen, till we're sure of it.

CHORUS.
Thou that dwellest in the shadow
Of great glory here beside us,
Spirit, Spirit, we have hied us
To thy dancing in the meadow!
Come, lacchus; let thy brow
Toss its fruited myrtle bough;
We are thine, happy dancer; O our comrade, come and guide us!
Let the mystic measure beat:
Come in riot fiery fleet;
Free and holy all before thee,
While the Charites adore thee,
And thy Mystae wait the music of thy feet!

XANTHIAS.
Virgin of Demeter, highly blest,
What an entrancing smell of roasted pig!

DIONYSUS.
Hush ! hold your tongue ! Perhaps they'll give you some.

CHORUS.
Spirit, Spirit, lift the shaken
Splendour of thy tossing torches!
All the meadow flashes, scorches:
Up, lacchus, and awaken!
Come, thou star that bringest light
To the darkness of our rite,
Till thine old men dance as young men, dance with every thought forsaken
Of the dulness and the fear
Left by many a circling year:
Let thy red light guide the dances
Where thy banded youth advances
To be joyous by the blossoms of the mere!

The lovely hymn to lacchos, as choragos of the mystae of Demeter, is speedily followed by a second hymn to the goddess herself the Fruit-bearer:

One hymn to the Maiden; now raise ye another To the Queen of the Fruits of the Earth.
To Demeter the Corn-giver, Goddess and Mother,
Make worship in musical mirth.

The blend of the smell of roast pork and the odour of mystic torches, of buffoonery and ecstasy, is the perfect image of the fusion of old and new.

In the ritual hymn of Delphi, already noted, Dionysos, who in the prooemium is addressed by his titles as god of a cereal drink, as Bromios and Braites, is when he leaves Parnassos and comes to Eleusis hailed by his new name lacchos:

'With thy wine cup waving high,
With thy maddening revelry,
To Eleusis'flowery vale
Comest thou Bacchos, Paean, hail!
Thither thronging all the race
Come, of Hellas, seeking grace
Of thy nine-year revelation,
And they called thee by thy name,
Loved lacchos, he who came
To bring salvation,
And disclose
His sure haven from all mortal woes.'

Sophocles in the Antigone invokes the god of many names for the cleansing of sin -stricken Thebes, but being an Athenian he remembers the god of the mysteries of Eleusis:

'Thou of the Many Names, delight and wonder
Of the Theban bride, Child of the pealing thunder,
Thou who dost rule over Italia's pride
And at Eleusis in Deo's bosom wide
Dwellest, Deo, she the mother of all,
Bacchos, Bacchos, on thee we call.'

Iacchos at Eleusis

Bacchos at Thebes, but, when the poet remembers the nocturnal rites of the mysteries, the name lacchos comes irresistibly back:

'Thou who dost lead the choir
Of stars aflame with fire,
Of nightly voices King,
Of Zeus offspring,
Appear, Lord, with thine attendant maids
The Thyiades,
Who mad and dancing through the long night chant
Their hymn to thee, lacchos, Celebrant.'

For lacchos at the Eleusinian mysteries we are not left to the evidence of poetry alone. Herodotus tells how, when Attica was being laid waste by Xerxes, Dicaeus, an exile, happened to be with Demaratus, a Lacedaemonian, in the Thriasian plain. They saw a great cloud of dust coming from Eleusis, so great that it seemed to be caused by thirty thousand men. They were wondering at the cloud, and they suddenly heard a sound, and the sound seemed to Dicaeus to be'the mystic lacchos.'Demaratos did not know about the sacred rites at Eleusis, and he asked what it might be that they heard. Dicaeus, who took the sound to be of ill omen to the Persians, explained it as follows: 'The Athenians celebrate this festival every year to the Mother and the Maiden, and any Athenian or other Greek who wishes is initiated, and the sound that you hear is the cry "lacchos," which they raise at this feast.'

The account is interesting because it shows that 'the lacchos' was a ritual cry, one easily recognizable by an Athenian, just as now-a-days we should recognize Alleluia or Hosanna. That the mysteries at Eleusis were still in the main of local import is clear from the fact that a Spartan did not recognise the cry.

Lacchos gave his name to one of the days of the Eleusinian mysteries the 20th of Boedromion (Sept., Oct.). On this day he was taken from his sanctuary in Athens, the laccheion, and escorted in solemn procession to Eleusis. Plutarch, in commenting on lucky and unlucky days, says he is aware that unlucky things sometimes happen on lucky days: for the Athenians had to receive a Macedonian garrison'even on the 20th of Boedromion, the day on which they lead forth the mystic lacchos.'

lacchos then was the name by which Dionysos was known at Eleusis, his mystery name par excellence for Athens. It is important to note what special form of the god the name expressed.

Strabo says vaguely, 'they call Dionysos, lacchos, and the spirit who is leader of the mysteries of Demeter'; but vagueness is pardonable in the particular connection in which he speaks, as he is concerned to show the general analogy of all orgiastic rites. Mvthologists have too readily concluded that lacchos is a vague title denoting a sort of 'genius of the mysteries' and the mystic lacchos' has come to mean anything and nothing in particular.

But Suidas is quite precise; he notes that lacchos means 'a certain day, 'a certain song,' but he puts, first and foremost, what is the root idea of lacchos, he is 'Dionysos at the breast.' Lacchos at Eleusis is not the beer-god, not the wine-god, but the son-god,'child of Semele, the wealth-giver,' the same as Liknites, 'He of the cradle,' whom, year by year on Parnassos, the Thyiades wakened to new life.

lacchos had his sanctuary at Athens and was received as a guest at Eleusis. Never, so far as we know, had he temple precinct or shrine at Eleusis, and his name occurs very rarely in inscriptions. He is a god made by the Athenians in their own image; they were guests at Eleusis, so their god was a guest. He is as it were a reflection of the influence of Athens at Eleusis.

Another point must be noted. Zagreus, it has been seen, is a god of ritual rather than poetry, lacchos is of poetry rather than ritual, of poetry touched and deepened by mysticism. He is just so much of the religion of Dionysos as the imaginative Athenian can face. We never hear that lacchos was a bull, there is no legend that he was torn to pieces. Sophocles, the most orthodox of poets, knows he has horns, but he sends his horned lacchos to dwell in fabulous Nysa,

'Where no shrill voice doth sound of any bird,'
and for the rest he is compact of torchlight and dancing.

The learned Nonnus, who is steeped in Orphism and a most careful ritualist, seems to hit the mark when he makes lacchos the latest born of the divine Bacchic incarnations. According to Nonnus, lacchos is the child of Aura by Bacchus, and is presented by his father to Athene, and Athene adopted him, and gave him the breast that before him none but Erechtheus had sucked. Here we have a manifest reminiscence of lacchos as 'Dionysos at the breast. Nonnus goes on to say how the nymphs, the Bacchae of Eleusis, received the new-born child with dance and song, and they hymned first Zagreus son of Persephone, next Bromios son of Semele, and third in order lacchos.

So shadowy, so poetical are the associations that cluster round the name lacchos, that, if lacchos were our only evidence of Dionysos at Eleusis, I should be inclined to believe his influence was in the main late and literary. It is to ritual we must look for evidence more substantial.

It is perhaps worth noting that Pausanias, in mentioning a trivial ritual taboo, notes that it is common to the mysteries of Eleusis and the teaching of Orpheus. He is speaking of the temple of the Bean-Man (Cyamites), but is uncertain of the origin of the name and cult, and knows he is treading on delicate ground, so he contents himself with saying darkly,'Whoever has seen the rite at Eleusis, or has read what are called the sayings of Orpheus, knows what I mean.'More than once, in examining a sanctuary of Demeter or Kore, he stops to note; that local tradition attributed its foundation to Orpheus. Thus at Sparta he saw a temple of Kore the Saviour, and 'some say Orpheus the Thracian made it, but others Abaris who came from the Hyperboreans.' Here the diverse tradition is unanimous as to Northern influence. The Lacedaemonians believed, he says, that Orpheus taught them to worship Demeter of the Underworld, but Pausanias himself thinks that they, like other people, got it from Hermione. No great importance can be attached to these floating traditions, but they serve to show that popular belief connected the worship of the Mother and the Maid with Orpheus and the North. We are inclined to connect the rise of their worship exclusively with Eleusis, so that local tradition to the contrary is of some value.

But the real substantial evidence as to the presence and influence of Orphic rites and conceptions at Eleusis is drawn from the Eleusinian ceremonial itself. Of the three main Orphic mysteries examined, the Omophagia, the Liknophoria, and the Sacred Marriage, two, the Liknophoria and the Sacred Marriage, are known with absolute certainty to have been practised at Eleusis.

The first and perhaps the most profound and characteristic of Orphic rites, the Omophagia, is wholly absent. The reason is not far to seek. The Omophagia, deep though its spiritual meaning was, is in its actual ritual savage and repulsive. We have seen a rite closely analogous practised by primitive nomadic Arabs. The cultus at Eleusis is, as has already been shown, based on agricultural conditions; the emergence of Eleusis was primarily due to the fertile Rarian corn plain. A god who comes to Eleusis, who is affiliated by this agricultural people, will shed the barbarous side of his worship, and develope only that side of his nature and ritual that is consonant with civilized life. A god canonly exist so long as he is the mirror of the people who worship him. Accordingly we find, as might be expected, that it is the Dionysos of agriculture, and of those marriage rites that go with agriculture, who is worshipped at Eleusis, worshipped with the rites of the Liknophoria and of the Sacred Marriage.

The Liknophoria at Eleusis

The Liknophoria as an element in the rites at Eleusis is clearly shown in the monument reproduced in figs. 155-157. The design forms the decoration of a cinerary urn (fig. 155) found in a grave near a Columbarium on the Esquiline Hill. The scenes represented are clearly rites of initiation.

In fig. 156 we see Demeter herself enthroned; about her is coiled her great snake caressed by the initiated mystic.

To the left stands a female torch-bearer; she is probably Persephone. This scene represents the final stage of initiation, where the epoptes is admitted to the presence and converse of the goddesses.

The remainder of the design (fig. 157) is occupied by two preliminary ceremonies of purification, the sacrifice of the 'mystic' pig already discussed and the liknon ceremonial.

It is on this last that attention must be focussed. The candidate is seated on a low seat his right foot rests on a ram's head which doubtless stands for the 'fleece of purification'; he is veiled and in his left hand carries a torch; above his head a priestess holds a liknon. It is remarkable that the liknon in this representation, unlike those previously discussed, contains no fruits.

This can scarcely, I think, be accidental. When the artist wishes to show fruits in a sacred vessel, he is quite able to do so, as is seen in the dish of poppy heads held by the priest to the right, where perspective is violated to make the content clear. The absence of the fruits is best, I think, explained on the supposition that the liknon is by this time mysticized. It is regarded as the winnowing fan, the 'mystic fan of lacchos' rather than as the basket of earth's fruits. It is held empty over the candidate's head merely as a symbol of purification. This explanation is the more probable, if the scene be, as is generally supposed, a representation of Eleusinian mysteries, but of Eleusinian mysteries held not at Eleusis but at Alexandria. The vertical corn-ears on the head of Demeter, the fringed garment of the youth who handles the snake, and the scale pattern that decorates the cover of the urn itself (fig. 155), all find their closer analogies in Egyptian rather than indigenous Greek monuments.

A Liknophoria, it is clear, was part of Eleusinian ritual. But the question naturally arises did not Dionysos borrow the liknon from Demeter rather than Demeter from Dionysos? It is almost certain that he did not. Dionysos was worshipped as Liknites at Delphi before he came to Eleusis. Moreover, in the Eleusinian 'tokens' the confession is not 'I have carried the liknon' but 'I have carried the kernos! That Kernophoria and Liknophoria were analogous ceremonies, both being the carrying of first-fruits, is possible; that they were identical is improbable. Dionysos borrowed the liknon from his own mother, not from her of Eleusis.

The Sacred Marriage and the Sacred Birth at Eleusis

Far more complete and satisfactory is the evidence for the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the holy child. These were as integral a part of the mysteries of Eleusis as of the rites of Sabazios and Dionysos.

Lacchos, we have seen, was defined as the child Dionysos at the breast, 'but for any ceremony of his birth or awakening under the name of lacchos we look in vain. lacchos is Athenian; no one ventured to say he was born at Eleusis, but by a most fortunate chance the record is left us of another Mother and Son at Eleusis, and we know too that the marriage of this Mother and the birth of this Son were the central acts, the culmination, of the whole ritual of its mysteries. We owe this knowledge to the anonymous treatise which has already furnished the important details as to the Mysteries of Phlya.

The author of the Philosophoumena is concerned to prove that the heretical sect of the Naassenes got their doctrine from ceremonials practised by the Phrygians. The Phrygians, the Naassene says, assert that god is a fresh ear of grain reaped.' He then goes on to make a statement to us of supreme importance. 'And following the Phrygians the Athenians, when they initiate at the Eleusinian rites, exhibit to the epoptae the mighty and marvellous and most complete epoptic mystery, an ear of grain reaped in silence. And this ear of grain the Athenians themselves hold to be the great and perfect light that is from that which has no form, as the Hierophant himself, who is not like Attis, but who is made a eunuch by means of hemlock and has renounced all carnal generation, he, by night at Eleusis, accomplishing by the light of a great flame the great and unutterable mysteries, says and cries in a loud voice "Holy Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimos," that is, the mighty has borne the mighty; and holy, he (i.e. the Naassene) says, is the generation that is spiritual, that is heavenly, that is from above, and mighty is he so engendered.'

The evidence of the writer of the Philosophoumena is indefeasible, not indeed as to the mystical meaning either he or the Naassene he quotes attached to the rites, but as to the rites themselves. He describes the rites only to discredit them and he quotes an actual ritual formulary. We may take it then as certain that to the epoptae at Eleusis was shewn as the supreme revelation a 'fresh ear reaped' and that by night there was declared to these epoptae the birth of a sacred Child: 'Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given.' The close conjunction in which the two rites are placed makes it highly probable, though not absolutely certain, that the one, the human birth, was but the anthropomorphic form of the other, that in fact we have here the drama of Liknites, child and fruit, reenacted; the thought is the same as that expressed by the vase-painter (fig. 153) where the new-born child rises out of the cornucopia of fruits. And last it is highly satisfactory to learn, and that from the mouth of a Christian writer, that the birth and the begetting were symbolical. The express statement that the Hierophant partook of some drug compelling abstinence cannot have been invented.

The author of the Philosophoumena says nothing of the Sacred Marriage, though from the birth of the holy Child it might be inferred. The confession 'I have gone down into the bridal chamber' is one of the'tokens'of the mysteries of the Great Mother, but we cannot certainly say that it was a 'token' at Eleusis; neither Clement nor Firmicus nor Arnobius includes it in his enumeration. We cannot therefore assert that each mystic at Eleusis went through a mimetic marriage, but we do know that the holy rite was enacted between the hierophant and the chief priestess of Demeter. Asterius, speaking of the various procedures of initiation at Eleusis, asks'is there not there the descent into darkness and the holy congress of the hierophant and the priestess, of him alone and her alone?'

Lucian adds incidental testimony. In his account of the doings of the false prophet Alexander he describes how the impostor instituted rites that were a close parody of those at Eleusis, and he narrates the details of the blasphemous travesty. Among the mimetic performances were not only the Epiphany and Birth of a god but the enactment of a Sacred Marriage. All preliminaries were gone through, and Lucian says that but for the abundance of lighted torches the marriage rite would actually have been consummated. The part of the hierophant was taken by the false prophet himself. A short time after the parody of the marriage ceremony he came in wearing the characteristic dress of the hierophant, and, amid a deep silence, announced in the usual loud voice 'Hail, Glykon,' and 'some fellows attending him, Paphlagonians, wearing sandals and smelling of garlic and supposed to be Eumolpidae and Kerykes, cried in answer "Hail, Alexander."'

Lucian's account of this scurrilous travesty is not pleasant reading, but it serves one important end it enables us to put together the two rites, the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the holy Child; but for Lucian the sequence must have remained conjectural. We may now be certain that in silence, in darkness and in perfect chastity the Sacred Marriage was first enacted, and that immediately after the Hierophant came forth, and, standing in a blaze of torchlight, cried aloud that the supreme mystery was accomplished, 'Holy Brimo has borne a sacred Child, Brimios.'

The Sacred Marriage formed part of the ritual of Eleusis, as it formed part of the Orphic mysteries of Sabazios and the Great Mother, but the further question arises was this Sacred Marriage indigenous at Eleusis or did it, like the religion of Dionysos, come from the North? Was Brimo only a title of the Eleusinian Demeter? This it would seem was the view of Clement who is not strong in ethnography, but it can I think be shown that Clement was wrong. Brimo is a form of the Great Mother who is also the Maid, but she is a Northern not an Eleusinian form. This is clearly evidenced by what we know of her apart from the mysteries.

Thessalian influence at Eleusis. Brimo.

Of Brimos we know nothing save as the mystery child; he is the attributive son marking by identity of name the function of his mother. Brimo we know as an underworld goddess, and, a fact all important for the argument, she comes from Pherae in Thessaly.

In the Alexandra of Lycophron Cassandra thus addresses her mother Hecuba:

'Mother, unhappy mother, not untold
Shall be thy fame, for Brimo, Perses' maid,
The Threefold One, shall for her ministrant
Take thee, to fright men with dire sounds at night,
Yea such as worship not with torchlit rites
The images of her who Strymon holds,
Pherae's dread goddess leaving unassoiled.'

For once Lycophron is intelligible; Hecuba is to be transformed into a hound of the triple Hecate, Thessalian goddess of the underworld, and Brimo is but her other name: she is the Thessalian Kore. The mystic child at Eleusis was born of a maiden; these ancients made for themselves the sacred dogma, 'A virgin shall conceive and bear a son'. It was left to Christian fathers, blending the motherhood of Demeter with the virgin mother and the parentage of Zeus, things they did not and would not understand, to make of the sacred legend a story of vile human incest.

Brimo, though we find her, in late times, in the very heart of the mysteries, belongs with her hell-hounds to a couche of mythology obviously primitive. To the popular mind of the uninitiated she lapsed into mere bogeydom. Lucian in his Oracle of the Dead brings her in with the rest of the comic horrors of Hades. When the underworld decree is passed the magistrates of Hades record their votes, the populace holds up its hands, 'Brimo snorts approval, Cerberus yelps his aye.'

But Apollonius Rhodius, writing of things Thessalian, and by natural temper inclined always to the serious and beautiful, knows of Brimo as terrible arid magical, but yet as the Nursing Mother (Kourotrophos). When Medea is about to pluck the awful underworld root for the undoing of Jason,

'Seven times bathed she herself in living founts,
Seven times called she on Brimo, she who haunts
The night, the Nursing Mother. In black weed
And murky gloom she dwells, Queen of the dead.'

And the scholiast commenting on the passage says she is Hecate, 'whom sorceresses were wont magically to induce, and they called her Brimo because of the terror and horror of her; and she sent against men the apparitions called Hekataia; and she was wont to change her shape, hence they called her Empusa.'He goes off into fruitless etymology but drops by the way a suggestion that may contain some truth, that the name Brimo is connected with ofipipos'raging,'the epithet of another Thracian, Ares.

Brimo then, some said, meant the Mighty, some the Angry One. The two, for minds obsessed by the atmosphere of 'aversion' are not far apart: the Angry-Raging One is own sister to the Angry Demeter, Demeter Erinys. But by their Angry name it is not well to address the gods, lest by sympathetic magic you rouse the very anger you seek to allay. Brimo may well have been one of the Silent Names.

Brimo is Thessalian, and Thessalian often spells 'later Thracian.' Brimo is near akin to the Mother Kotys, the mystery goddess of the Thracians, but we cannot say that she is herself certainly Thracian. For definite evidence of a Thracian element at Eleusis we must look to its chief hereditary priesthood, the family from which the Hierophant was taken, the Eumolpidae.

Thracian influence at Eleusis. Eumolpos

The Eumolpidae must also be the keystone of any contention as to Thracian influence at Eleusis, and fortunately we are fairly well informed as to their provenance.

Sophocles in the Oedipus Coloneus makes the chorus sing:

'0 to be there
Upon the sea shore, where,
Ablaze with light,
The Holy Ones for mortals their dread rite
Nurse, and on mortal lips the golden key
Is set of celebrant Eumolpidae.'

The scholiast asks the very pertinent question 'Why in the world have the Eumolpidae presidency over the rites, when they are foreigners?' He proceeds as usual to make several puzzled and contradictory suggestions. Perhaps the reason is that it was Eumolpos, son of Deiope daughter of Triptolemos, who first instituted the mysteries at Eleusis, and not the Thracian, and this was the view taken by Istros in his book on 'Things out of Order,' or perhaps Akesidorus was right; his theory was that the Eumolpos who founded the rites was fifth in descent from the first Eumolpos.

Unpleasant facts are always apt to be classed as 'Things out of Order.' Facts are facts, but Order is what you happen to like yourself. The simple fact cheerfully accepted at Eleusis was that the Eumolpidae were Thracians, but the Athenians did not like the Thracians, so when they came to Eleusis they proceeded to get the unpalatable fact into'order.'One of two things must be done, either the Eumolpidae, whose respectability was above impeachment, must be provided with a new and local parentage, they must be affiliated to Triptolemos, or the old parentage must be removed to a safe and decorous antiquity. Few people feel very acutely about what happened five generations ago.

But all the time historians knew perfectly well what really had happened, and Akesidorus proceeds to state it quite simply: 'Tradition says that Eleusis was first inhabited by an autochthonous population, and then by those Thracians who came with Eumolpos to help in the war against Erechtheus.'He lets out at last what was at the bottom of the whole complication, a fight between Eleusis and Athens and a contingent of Thracian auxiliaries. The war had been internecine, for the legend says the single combat between Erechtheus and Eumolpos ended in the death of both. Athens ultimately emerged to political supremacy, but Eleusis, to which Eumolpos first brought his rites, maintained her religious hegemony. Athens did what she could. She even built herself an Eleusinion and instituted Lesser Mysteries; there was much to-ing and fro-ing of sacred objects, the lepd are brought from Eleusis and lacchos makes a return visit, but the actual final initiation takes place at Eleusis and the chief celebrant is still to all time a Thracian Eumolpid.

Art is not without its evidence as to Eumolpos at Eleusis. The simple vase-painter is untroubled by the Eleusinian blend of Dionysos and Demeter, and the Thracian origin of Eumolpos. On the kotyle in fig. 158, signed by the potter Hieron, and now in the British Museum, he has brought together in friendly comradeship a group of Eleusinian personages, some of the ancient local stock, some of the northern immigrants. All the figures are carefully inscribed, so that there is no question of doubtful interpretation. On the obverse, and plainly occupying the central important place, the young local hero Triptolemos starts in his winged chariot to carry his ears of corn to the world. Demeter in her splendid robe stands behind him, and 'Pherophatta' pours out the farewell cup. Triptolemos was, as has already been noted, originally a local king; it may be he became young out of complimentary rivalry with the child lacchos. Behind'Pherophatta'stands a nymph whom, but for the inscription, we should not have dared to name,'Eleusis.'Beneath one handle, looking back at the group of local divinities, is the seated Eumolpos, and near him is a great swan for Eumolpos is the sweet singer. He is the Thracian warrior when he fights Erechtheus, but here he holds the sceptre as priestly king; he is, Thracian fashion, compounded of Ares and Orpheus. The centre of this reverse picture is occupied by the Thracian Dionysos, with his great vine branch, and behind him comes his father Zeus, with thunderbolt and sceptre. Dionysos a full-grown man, not babe, balances Triptolemos. Eumolpos is vis d vis to Poseidon, with whom he had close relations. Amphitrite completes the picture, a veritable little manual of the mythology of Eleusis.

The Delphic Dionysos at Eleusis and Agrae

Another class of vase-paintings, in date nearly a century later than that of Hieron, bring before us Dionysos at Eleusis, but they depict him as an incomer, not from Thrace, but from the half-way station of Delphi. A polychrome vase of the 4th century B.C., formerly in the Tyskiewicky Collection (fig. 159), puts the matter very clearly. The central figure is Demeter, crowned and sceptred, sitting on an altar-like throne. To the right is Kore with her torches.

She turns towards Dionysos. He too is seated, as becomes a god, and he holds his thyrsos. He is seated, but on what a throne! He is seated on the omphalos. To the ancient mind no symbolism could speak more clearly; Dionysos is accepted at Eleusis; he has come from Delphi and brought his omphalos with him.

We are apt to regard the omphalos as exclusively the property of Apollo, and it comes as something of a shock to see Dionysos seated quietly upon it. We have already seen that Apollo took it from Ge, took the ancient symbol of Mother Earth and made it his oracular throne; but at Delphi men knew that it had another and earlier content. It was the tomb of the dismembered Dionysos. The tradition that Dionysos was buried at Delphi is recorded again and again by lexicographers, Christian Fathers, and Byzantine historians; but the common source of their information seems to be the Atthis of Philochoros (3rd cent. B.C.).

Cedrenus, in his history of the whole world, tells the story of how Dionysos was chased from Boeotia, and ended his days at Delphi,'and the remains of him are buried there in a coffin. And his gear is hung up in the sanctuary, as the learned Demarchus says in his history of him. And the learned Philochoros gives the same account in his exposition about Dionysos himself; his tomb is to be seen near the gold Apollo.

It may be conjectured that there is a sort of basis on which he writes "Here lies the dead Dionysos the son of Semele" We need not attach serious importance to what is 'conjectured' as the conjecture seems to be rather of Cedrenus than Philochoros, but it is clear that Philochoros recorded a tradition that the tomb of Dionysos was at Delphi. Tatian identifies the tomb of Dionysos with the omphalos.

The vase in fig. 159 does not stand alone. The Ninnion pinax, though details in its interpretation remain obscure, is clear on this one point the influence of Delphi on the Mysteries.

The Greater and Lesser Mysteries

In the discussion of this difficult and important monument I shall confine myself to such points as seem to me certain and immediately relevant. The inscription at the base tells us that it was dedicated by a woman 'Ninnion' to the 'Two Goddesses'. The main field of the pinax is occupied by two scenes, occupying the upper and lower halves, and divided, according to the familial convention of the vase-painter, into two parts by an irregular white line, indicating the ground on which the figures in the upper part stand. In each of these two parts some of the figures, distinguished by their larger size, are divine, e.g. the seated goddesses to the right; others, of smaller stature, are human.

Among the human figures in both the upper and lower row one is marked out by the fact that she carries on her head a kernos. She is a dancing Kernophoros. She is the principal figure among the worshippers, and she can scarcely be other than Ninnion, who dedicated the pinax. In a word, Ninnion, in her votive offering, dedicates the representation of one, and certainly an important, element in her own initiation, her Kernophoria.

Of this initiation why does she give a twofold representation? The answer, once suggested, is simple and convincing. Each and every candidate was twice initiated, once in the spring, at Agrae, in the Lesser Mysteries; once in the autumn, at Eleusis, in the Greater Mysteries. The scene in the lower half is the initiation at Agrae, that in the upper half the initiation at Eleusis. It is the scene in the lower half that specially concerns us.

The two seated goddesses to the right are clearly the 'Two Goddesses' and the lower one is, it is equally evident, the younger, Kore. She is seated in somewhat curious fashion on the ground; near her is an empty throne. Some interpreters have said that the vase-painter meant her to be seated on the throne, but by an oversight drew in her figure seated a little above it. But the artist's intention is quite clear. Kore is seated on the ground, indicated by the curved white line beneath her. The empty throne is intentional and emphatic. Demeter, who should be seated on it, who in the upper tier is seated on a throne precisely identical, is absent. A vase-painter could not speak more clearly.

The explanation is again as simple as illuminating. The lower tier represents the initiation of Ninnion into the Lesser Mysteries at Agrae. These were sacred to Persephone, not Demeter. The scholiast on the Plutus of Aristophanes says: 'In the course of the year two sets of mysteries are performed to Demeter and Kore, the Lesser and the Greater the Greater were of Demeter, the Lesser of Persephone her daughter.'He further tells us that these Lesser Mysteries were a sort of prepurification for the Greater, and that they were founded later than the great Eleusinian Mysteries, tradition said, in order that Herakles might be initiated. To these statements Stephen of Byzantium adds an important fact: 'the Lesser Mysteries performed at Agra or Agrae were' he says, 'an imitation of what happened about Dionysos'.

With these facts in pur minds we are able to interpret the lower row of figures. Kore alone receives the mystic Ninnion, and Dionysos himself acts as Dadouchos. That the figure holding the torches is a god is clear from his greater stature, and, if a god, he can be none other than Dionysos, who, as lacchos, led the mystics in their dance. Dionysos has come from Delphi and brought his great white omphalos, his Delphic grave, with him. Below it are depicted two of the bundles of myrtle twigs, which are frequently the emblems of initiation, and which bore the name of 'Bacchoi'.

Delphic Influence at Eleusis

This interpretation is confirmed when we turn to the upper tier. 'Ninnion,' having been initiated by Dionysos into the mysteries at Agrae, which he shared with Kore, now comes for the Greater Mysteries to Eleusis. Kore herself brings her mystic, and leads her into the presence of Demeter enthroned. The scene is the telesterion of Eleusis marked by two columns, which, be it noted, extend only half-way down the pinax. In the Lesser Mysteries, a later foundation, Dionysos shares the honours with Kore; in the Greater and earlier to the end he is only a visitant.

The direct influence of Delphi on Eleusis as evidenced by these vases, and by many inscriptions, may have been comparatively late, but in a place to which Eumolpos had already brought the worship of Dionysos it would have easy access. At home Delphi became in the lapse of time more and more 'all for Apollo,' but abroad, as Athens, Eleusis, and Magnesia testify, she remembered sometimes to promote the worship of a god greater than Apollo, a god who was before him, and who never ceased, even at Delphi, to be his paredros, Dionysos.

Both on the kotylos of Hieron (fig. 158) and on the Tyskiewicky vase (fig. 159) Dionysos at Eleusis is represented as a full-grown man, not as a mystery babe. This fact is highly significant. The son has ceased to be a child, and growing to maturity forgets his relation to his mother. In the old Thracian religion, preserved in its primitive savagery in Asia Minor, the Mother, by whatever name she be called, whether Kotys or Kybele or Rhea or the Great Mother, is the dominant factor; the Son is, as is natural in a matriarchal civilization, at first but the attribute of motherhood. When a cult is mainly in the hands of primitive women they will tend to keep their male god in the only condition they can keep him, i.e. as child. But if that cult is to advance with civilization, if the god is to have his male worshippers, he must grow to be a man; and as the power of the Son waxes and he becomes more and more the Father, the power of the Mother wanes, and she that was the Great Mother sinks to be Semele the thunder-stricken. If we bear in mind the old principle that man makes the gods in his own image, that a god only is because he reflects the life of his worshipper, the constant shift of Dionysos from child to full-grown man, from Son of his Mother to Son of his Father, becomes intelligible, nay more, necessary.

In all probability the development of Dionysos from child to man was helped and precipitated by his appropriation of the vine a spirit of intoxication will be worshipped by man as much and perhaps more than by women. But the interesting thing about Dionysos is that, develope as he may, he bears to the end, as no other god does, the stamp of his matriarchal origin. He can never rid himself of the throng of worshipping women, he is always the nursling of his Maenads. Moreover the instruments of his cult are always not his but his mother's. It is not enough to say that all orgiastic cults have analogies, nor, as is usually maintained, that the worship of Kybele came in classical times from Asia Minor, and was contaminated with that of Dionysos. All this is true, but the roots of the analogy lie deeper down. The Mother and the Son were together from the beginning. Brimos never came to Eleusis without Brimo. Demeter at Eleusis did not borrow her cymbals from Rhea; she had her own, and Dionysos shared them. Pindar knows it, if only half consciously:

'Or this, O Thebes, thy soul hath for its pride,
That Dionysos thou to birth didst bring,
Him of the flowing hair, who sits beside
Deo for whom the brazen cymbals ring.'

Strabo, as we have already seen, knew that the orgies of Thrace and Phrygia and Crete were substantially the same, that Kuretes and Satyrs and Korybants, attendants on the Son, are also satellites of the Mother and he cites Euripides. The Bacchae never forget that their worship is of the Mother as of the Son:

'But the Timbrel, the Timbrel is another's,
And away to Mother Rhea it must wend;
And to our holy singing from the Mother's
The mad Satyrs carried it, to blend
In the dancing and the cheer
Of our third and perfect Year;
And it serves Dionysos in the end.'

But the modern mind, obsessed and limited by a canonical Olympus, an Olympus which is 'all for the Father,' has forgotten the Great Mother, robbed the Son of half his grace, and left him desolate of all kinship save adoption.

It is not hard to see why at Eleusis the mother of Dionysos should fade into obscurity, fade so all but entirely that save for the one mention in the Philosophoumena we should have had no certainty of the birth of the holy child. Eleusis, before the coming of Eumolpos and Dionysos, had its Mother-goddess Demeter, and she would not lightly brook a rival. The old matriarchal couple, the Mother and the Maid, who though they were two persons were yet but one goddess, had for their foster-child now one local hero, now another, now Demophon, now and chiefly Triptolemos. At the coming of the northern Mother and Son, of Brimo and Brimos or Semele and Dionysos, matters had to be adjusted between the immigrant and the indigenous divinities. The northern Mother fades almost wholly, but in the Mysteries her Thessalian name is still proclaimed aloud. The attributive child Brimos is merged, partly in the Athenian lacchos, partly in the local hero Triptolemos, who, to meet him half way, descended from his high estate as local chieftain to become a beautiful boy in a chariot drawn by snakes.

The hopeless fusion and confusion is well evidenced by monuments like the relief from Eleusis in fig. 161. Here are the Mother and the Maid, the Mother with her sceptre, the Maid with her torch, and between them is a boy, their nursling. Is he Triptolemos, is he lacchos? The question may be asked, learned monographs may be and have been written in favour of either name, but it is a question that can never certainly be answered. He is the young male divinity of Eleusis, the nursling of the goddesses; beyond that we cannot go.

The rite of the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the Holy Child have been considered in detail because they were, I believe, the central mystery. Asterius, in his 'Encomium on the Blessed Martyrs' already cited, protests against the Eleusinian Mysteries as the head and front of heathen idolatry and speaks of the Sacred Marriage as its crowning act.' Are not the Mysteries at Eleusis the chief act of your worship and does not the Attic people and the whole land of Hellas assemble that it may accomplish a rite of folly? Is there not there performed the descent into darkness, the venerated congress of the Hierophant with the priestess, of him alone with her alone? Are not the torches extinguished and does not the vast and countless assemblage believe that in what is done by the two in darkness is their salvation?'

Making all allowance for the fact that Christian Fathers naturally focus their attention on rites they chose to regard as immoral, it is yet abundantly clear that at Eleusis the Marriage and the Birth were the culminating ritual acts, acts by which union with the divine, the goal of all mystic ceremonial, was at first held to be actually effected, later symbolized.

Preceded by rites of purification such as the Liknophoria, amplified, emphasized by endless subordinate scenes, reenacted in various mythological forms, as e.g. in the rape of Persephone, they yet remained at Eleusis, at Samothrace and elsewhere, the cardinal mysteries. Man makes the rites of the gods in the image of his human conduct. The mysteries of these man-made gods are but the eternal mysteries of the life of man. The examination of endless various and shifting details would lead us no further.

Crete and the Mysteries

Before we leave the Sacred Marriage, an ethnographical point of some interest remains to be considered.

In Crete we found the Omophagia and the Mother, but no marriage rite, arid yet there is evidence that makes it highly probable that Demeter and her marriage developed in Crete and q came thence to Eleusis.

Such is the tradition of the Homeric Hymn:

'Dos is the name that to me my holy mother gave, And I am come from Crete across the wide sea-water wave.'

This may be a mere chance pirate legend, but such legends often echo ethnographical fact.

Again at the close of the Hymn the poet seems to remember the island route by which Demeter passed to Thessaly:

'Goddess who holdst the fragrance of Eleusis in thy hand,
Mistress of rocky Antron and Faros'sea-girt strand,
Lady revered, fair Deo, gift-giver year by year,
Thou and thy fair Persephone, to us incline thine ear.

Whether Demeter brought her daughter from Crete must remain for the present unconsidered; but from mythology, not ritual, we learn that in Crete she had a Sacred Marriage. Calypso, recounting the tale of ancient mortal lovers of whom the gods were jealous, says:

'So too fair-haired Demeter once in the spring did yield
To love, and with lasion lay in a new-ploughed field.
But not for long she loved him, for Zeus high overhead
Cast on him his white lightning and lasion lay dead.'

It is one of the lovely earth-born myths that crop up now and again in Homer, telling of an older simpler world, of gods who had only half emerged from the natural things they are, real earth-born flesh and blood creatures, not splendid phantoms of an imagined Olympic pageant. To smite and slay these primitive divinities of the order he supersedes, Zeus is always ready with I his virtuous thunderbolt.

Hesiod, if later in date, is almost always earlier in thought than Homer. He knows of the Marriage and knows that it was in Crete:

'Demeter brought forth Ploutos; a glorious goddess she,
And yet she loved lasion, a mortal hero he.
In Crete's rich furrows lay they; glad and kindly was the birth
Of him whose way is on the sea and over all the Earth.
Happy, happy is the mortal who doth meet him as he goes,
For his hands are full of blessings and his treasure overflows.'

Theocritus knows that this Marriage of lasion was a Mystery:

'Oh, happy, happy, in his changeless fate,
Endymion dreaming; happy, Love, and great
lasion, who won the mystic joy
That ye shall never learn, Unconsecrate !'

Hesiod is all husbandman; he knows of no mystery child, only of the old agricultural mimetic rite and the child who is the fruits of the earth and of the sea. Zeus with his thunder has not yet come to make of innocent bliss a transgression. Hesiod might have written the ancient tag preserved for us by his scholiast: 'Ah for the wheat and barley, child Ploutos.'

The writer of the Homeric Hymn is altogether Zeus-ridden, hence many of the anomalies and absurdities of the tale he so beautifully tells; he is Homeric in his aloofness from things primitive, he is also Orphic in his emphasis on the spiritual bliss of the initiated and in his other-worldliness. He is concerned to show their future weal rather than their present wealth:

Blessed is he among men who is given these rites to know, But the uninitiate man, the man without, must go To no such happy lot when dead in the dusk below.'

And yet, so strong is the ancient agricultural tradition and association of the rites that the primitive sacred child of Crete, the Wealth-god, reemerges almost automatically at the close, though in half abstracted fashion, born of heaven not earth:

'Then when the goddess all things had ordered of her grace,
She fared to high Olympus, their great assembly place.
There do they dwell with Father Zeus, who thunders through the sky,
Holy and reverend are their names, and great his earthly joy
Whom they vouchsafe to love. Above all mortals is he blest,
Swiftly they send to his great home Ploutos to be his guest.'

The mimetic marriage of Crete, a bit of sympathetic magic common to many primitive peoples, became a cardinal mystic rite. Diodorus in a very instructive passage tells us that in Crete 'mysteries' were not mysterious, and we shall not, I think, be far wrong if we suppose that the Cretan non-mysterious form was the earlier. After discussing Cretan mythology he says: 'The Cretans in alleging that they from Crete conferred on other mortals the services of the gods, sacrifices and rites appertaining to mysteries, bring forward this point as being to their thinking; the principal piece of evidence. The rite of initiation, which is perhaps the most celebrated of all, is that which is performed by the Athenians at Eleusis, and the rite at Samothrace and that in Thrace among the Cicones, the country of Orpheus, inventor of rites, all these are imparted as mysteries, whereas in Crete at Cnossos the custom from ancient times was that these rites should be communicated openly and to all, and things that among the other peoples were communicated in secrecy among the Cretans no one concealed from any one who wished to know.'

The Cretans, like most patriots, went a little too far. The gods had not left themselves without witness among other peoples till they, the elect Cretans, started on their missionary enterprise. But, as regards certain mystery rites, as regards two of those discussed in detail, the Omophagia and the Sacred Marriage, may not their statement have been substantially true? Before the downward movement of Dionysos from the North, may there not have been an upward movement of (shall we say) Orpheus from the South? May not the Orphic mysteries of the Mother have started, or at least fully developed, in matriarchal Crete, Crete that was to the end 'of the Mother' that refused even in her language to recognize the foolish empty patriarchalism, 'Father-land'? In Crete the discoveries of Mr Arthur Evans have shown us a splendid and barbarous civilization, mature, even decadent, before the uprising of Athens. From Crete to Athens came Epimenides, who is but a quasi-historical Orpheus, and with him he brought rites of cleansing. In Cretan 'Mycenaean' civilization and only there, is seen that strange blend of Egyptian and Pelasgian' that haunted Plutarch and made him say that Osiris was one with Dionysos, Isis with Demeter.

Diodorus, quoting the local tradition, knows the very route by which the rites of Crete went northward, by way of the islands, ! by Sarnothrace home of the mysteries, up to the land of the Cicones. There, it would seem, Orpheus the sober met the raging wine-god, there the Maenads slew him, and repented and upraised his sanctuary. Thence the two religions, so different yet so intimately fused, came down to Greece, a conjoint force, dominant, irresistible. Mysticism and 'Enthusiasm' are met together, and, for Greek religion, the last word is said.

Orpheus for all his lyre-playing is a priest or rather a 'religious' Dionysos is, at least as we know him at Athens, less priest than artist. Most primitive religions have Spcopeva, but from the religion of Dionysos sprang the drama. The analogy between things done, actions, and a Thing Acted in the stage sense, has been often observed, but the problem still remains why was the transition effected in the religion of Dionysos and in his only, why have Athene and Zeus and Poseidon no drama, only poetry asks no explanation, or finds it instantly in our common human egotism. But we are apt to forget that from the epos, the narrative, to the drama, the enactment, is a momentous step, one, so far as we know, not taken in Greece till after centuries of epic achievement, and then taken suddenly, almost in the dark, and irrevocably.

All we really know of this momentous step is that it was taken some time in the sixth century B.C. and taken in connection with the worship of Dionysos. Surely it is at least possible that the real impulse to the drama lay not wholly in 'goat-songs' and 'circular dancing places' but also in the cardinal, the essentially dramatic, conviction of the religion of Dionysos, that the worshipper can not only worship, but can become, can be, his god. Athene and Zeus and Poseidon have no drama because no one, in his wildest moments, believed he could become and be Athene or Zeus or Poseidon. It is indeed only in the orgiastic religions that these splendid moments of conviction could come, and, for Greece at least, only in an orgiastic religion did the drama take its rise.

In the rites at Eleusis of which most details are known we have the very last stage of the development before the final step was actually taken, we have spcojueva on the very verge of drama.

Late authors in describing the Eleusinian rites use constantly the vocabulary of the stage. Take the account of Psellus, whose testimony has been too much neglected. Psellus is recording 'what the Greeks believe about demons' and he passes from theology to ritual. 'Yes and the mysteries of these (demons), as for example those of Eleusis, enact the double story of Deo or Demeter and her daughter Pherephatta or Kore. As in the rite of initiation love affairs are to take place, Aphrodite of the Sea is represented as uprising. Next there is the wedding rite for Kore. And the initiated sing as an accompaniment "I have eaten from the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbals, I have carried the kernos, I have gone down into the bridal chamber." Then also they enact the birth-pains of Deo. At least there are cries of entreaty of Deo, and there is the draught of gall and the throes of pain. After these there is a goat-legged mime because of what Zeus did to Demeter. After all this there are the rites of Dionysos and the cista and the cakes with many bosses and the initiated to Sabazios and the Klodones and Mimallones who do the rites of the Mother and the sounding cauldron of Thesprotia and the gong of Dodona and a Korybas and a Koures, separate figures, mimic forms of demons. After this is the action of Baubo.

Psellus shows us the sacred pantomime in full complexity. From other sources we know that it was not all dumb-show, that other words were spoken besides the confession of the 'tokens.' Galen when he is urging his readers to attend to natural science no less than theology says: 'Lend me then your whole attention even more than you did supposing you were initiated in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries or any other holy rite and gave yourself up wholly to the things done and the things spoken by the Hierophants.'

The fashion in which the'things spoken'supplemented and helped out the 'things done'comes out very clearly in the curious fictitious legal case which occurs among the collection of rhetorical exercises made by Sopater. A young man dreams that he is initiated, and sees the'things done.'He recounts the'things done'to an initiated friend and asks if they correspond to the actual Eleusinian rite. The friend nods assent. Is the friend guilty of impiety, i.e. has he revealed the 'things done' to one uninitiated? No, argues the initiated man, for the dreamer was really initiated by the goddesses themselves; only one thing was lacking to him, he had not heard the voice of the hierophant so as to understand clearly the sense of the symbols uttered by him. The symbols uttered must have been words corresponding to, explanatory of, the things done, dark enough no doubt, but felt to be illuminating. The Hierophant acted as sacred showman to the pantomime. Here we have brought into close, inevitable conjunction the narrative element of the epos and the action element of the drama. We have all the apparatus of the stage, the appearances and disappearances, the dancing and the singing, the lights, the voices and the darkness. Religion gave all the circumstances and the scenery, religion woke the instinct of intense impersonation, some genius made the dumb figures speak themselves and tragedy was born.

Dionysos gave men tragedy to gladden and to greaten their toilsome life on earth. His other great gift was, as has been already shown, the hope that by attaining divinity they would as a necessary consequence attain immortality. To the dim forecast of some sort of after guerdon that Demeter gave, he brought something as near conviction as the human mind can get. Plutarch writes to his wife when they have lost their little girl, who was so like the father and so dear to the mother, and he bids her remember both her traditional faith and'the mystic symbols of the rites of initiation to Dionysos.'These, he says, will prevent her from thinking that the soul suffers nothing after death, that it ceases to be. He reads into these rites of course his own Platonism; they teach him that the soul is like a bird caught in a cage, caught and recaught ever in new births, that the evil of old age is not its wrinkles and grey hairs but, hardest thing of all, the dimness and staleness of the soul to the memory of things'there'not here; and the soul that leaves the body soon is not cramped and bent but only softly and pliantly moulded and soon shakes its mane and is free, just as fire that is quenched and relighted forthwith flames and sparkles anew. The customs of his country forbade him to make libations for children, and he reads into the old barbarous convention, based on the harmlessness of the child-ghost, the doctrine that children have no part in earth and earthly things, but have passed straightway to a better and more divine fate. Still in the mystic symbols of Dionysos he sees only what was there implicit if only in dim fashion.

It has been thought that the rites of Eleusis and other Orphic mysteries contained among these'things done'mimetic presentations of a future life, a sort of revelation and instruction for the conduct of the soul in the world below. Elements of this kind, it will later be seen, may easily have been interpolated from Egypt, but for Eleusis we have no certain evidence. The best witness to the faith of the Orphic as to the future life are his own confessions buried with him in his tomb, inscribed happily for us on imperishable gold, and to this witness we must now turn.