§ 3
As to the actual details of what went on at the long-drawn-out festival itself our knowledge hardly extends beyond the most external circumstances, and is even so most incomplete. A few notices in late and often untrustworthy writers give us a very inadequate picture of what took place inside the great temple of initiation and of the essential Mystery. The secret which was committed[19] to the Mystai and Epoptai has been well kept. Considering the enormous number of worshippers indiscriminately admitted to the festival, this would, indeed, have been a real miracle, if the secret to be kept had taken the form of dogma expressed in concept and words and capable of being communicated verbally to others. Since the labours of Lobeck, however, drastically reducing to order the confusion of opinions on this subject, no reasonable person believes that this was the case. It was difficult to let out the “secret” for there was essentially no secret to let out. Profanation could only come through actions, through “the Mysteries being acted”,[20] as they were in the year 415 in the house of Poulytion. The Mystery was a dramatic performance, or, more strictly, a religious Pantomime, accompanied by sacred songs[21] and formal speeches; a representation, as Christian authors let us see, of the Rape of Korê, the wanderings of Demeter, and the final reunion of the goddesses. This in itself would not have made the mysteries remarkable; a similar dramatic reproduction of the circumstances attending the life of a god, which had led to the foundation of the festival in question, was a very widespread cult-practice in Greece; it was part of the festivals of Zeus, Here, Apollo, Artemis, Dionysos, and, above all, of other festivals in honour of Demeter herself. But the Eleusinia was distinguished from all other such festivals, even from the equally secret festivals of Demeter known as the Thesmophoria and the Haloa, by reason [223] of the hopes which it inspired in the minds of the initiated. The Hymn to Demeter tells us that the pious worshipper of the Goddess at Eleusis might hope for riches upon earth and a better fate after death. Later authorities also speak of the success in this life which initiation at Eleusis gave good ground for expecting. But far more emphatic are the statements, made by innumerable witnesses from Pindar and Sophokles onwards, that only they who have been initiated into these mysteries may entertain a joyful expectation of the life to come. To them only is it granted to have real “life” in Hades; nothing but evil awaits others in that place.[22]
It was these promises of a blessed immortality that for centuries drew so many worshippers to the Eleusinian festival. Nowhere else could such promises be obtained with such distinctness and assurance. The injunction commanding secrecy must obviously have referred to quite other matters; it cannot have applied to this, the greatest boon anticipated from initiation at Eleusis. Everyone speaks out aloud and without restraint about it. At the same time, all our information is so completely at one on the point and so free from doubt or uncertainty that we must perforce believe that the performances that were to be preserved so secret were, in reality, for the believers the source of an assurance which was not held as the mere probable conjecture of individuals, but as fixed and certain truth beyond question or need of interpretation.
How this was brought about certainly remains obscure. Since the discrediting of “symbolism” in the sense made familiar by Creuzer or Schelling, many of our modern mythologists and historians of religion have been all the more eager to assert that the performances at the Eleusinian mysteries were in reality the true and mystic celebration of the Greek “Religion of Nature” as discovered by themselves. Demeter, in this view, would be the earth; Korê-Persephone, her daughter, the seed of corn; the Rape and Return of Korê would mean the sowing of the seed in the earth and the rise of the young grain from beneath the soil; or, in a more general sense, “the yearly decay and renewal of vegetation.” In some way or other the Mystai must have had revealed to them the real meaning of the “nature-symbolism” hidden in the mystical performances. Witnessing these performances they are supposed to have learnt that the fate of the seed of corn, represented by Persephone, its disappearance beneath the earth and eventual rebirth, is an image of the fate of the human soul, which also disappears that it may [224] live again. This, then, must be the real content of the holy Mystery.
It remains, however, first and foremost, to be proved that the Greeks[23] themselves would have regarded such symbolistic mummery, in which the phenomena and processes of nature appear under the guise of anthropomorphic gods, as religious at all, or would have recognized their own religion in such things. Still further—admitting for the sake of argument the possibility of such an interpretation—the identification of Korê with the seed of corn and its fate leads at once, if we try to get beyond the vaguest generalities, to intolerable absurdity. It is difficult to see, however (and this would be the main point at issue), how such an analogy between the soul and the grain of seed could have led to a faith in immortality that was not to be had, it would seem, in a more direct fashion. What possible effect could have been produced by such a far-fetched and arbitrary parallel between the phenomena of two such wholely different provinces of existence? If a reasonably plausible deduction was to be made from the visible and unmistakable (the condition of the grain) to the invisible and unknown (the condition of the soul) surely the first and simplest requisite would be that a real causal connexion between the two should be plainly demonstrated. These may seem dull and pedantic considerations where the sublimest forebodings of the heart are concerned; but I should not have supposed that it would have been so easy to tempt the Greeks with vague surmises from the path of logic and lucidity, or that such surmises would have afforded them such extremity of “bliss”.
Lastly, the analogy, even if it proved anything, is false. It would only hold if the soul, like the grain, after a temporary disappearance below the earth, were promised a new life upon the earth—if a palingenesia in fact were promised. That this, however, was not a belief supported by the officially conducted mysteries of Athens, is admitted on all hands.
Equally untenable is the view that the dramatic presentation at the mysteries of the Rape and Return of Korê (regarded this time as a divine personage, not as the personified grain of corn) was intended to inspire hopes of an analogous fate for the human soul, by virtue of a mystic unification of the life of man with the life of the godhead to whom he swears allegiance.[24] Even so the hope based upon the typical fate of Korê could only have led to a hope for the palingenesia of mankind in general, not (what was and always remained the real belief of Eleusis) to the hope of a specially [225] favoured after-life for the Mystai in the kingdom below the world. Indeed, we must not look to the Eleusinian mysteries for the ecstatic exaltation of the soul to the recognition of its own godhead—though such exaltation was the motive force and the essential core of Greek mysticism, as of all mysticism and mystic religion. From the mysteries of Eleusis, however, it remained far removed; the belief there fostered, with its absolute division and distinction between the divine and the human, never transgressed the bounds of popular Greek religion, over whose portals stood the universally prescriptive words: ἓν ἀνδρῶν, ἓν θεῶν γένος—“the race of men is one, and the race of gods is another.” Nor was Eleusis any exception to this rule; the mysteries did not point the way to mysticism.