§ 4
Inquiry is on the wrong track when a deeper meaning is sought for in the mimic presentation of the sacred myth at Eleusis whereby the human soul was to obtain the blessed hope of immortality. The conviction that the human soul was immortal in its own right, by reason of its own nature, was not a conviction that was obtained at Eleusis. That is why we may dismiss such fanciful analogies as those between the human soul and the seed of corn or the goddess of the earth’s life. Such analogies, if they proved anything, would prove at most the complete indestructibility, in spite of all vicissitude, of the life of the human soul—of every human soul. But this was not Eleusinian doctrine. The continued conscious existence of the soul after its separation from the body was not a doctrine but a presupposition of Eleusis; and it could be thus presupposed because it was the basic idea of the popular and widespread cult offered to the souls of the departed.[25] The advantage obtained by the initiated at Eleusis was that a livelier and fuller content was given to the bare existence of the disembodied soul, which was all that the current worship of the souls essentially contemplated. We are assured that only the initiated at Eleusis will have a real “life” after death; that evil will be the fate of “the others”.[26] Not that the soul, relieved of the presence of the body, will live hereafter, but how it will live was what Eleusis taught men. With the calm assurance common to all close and confined religious associations, the Eleusinian society divided mankind into two classes: the “Pure”, that is those who had been initiated at Eleusis, and the innumerable multitude of the uninitiated. Only for the members in [226] communion with the mystery of Eleusis was salvation assured. Salvation was theirs as a reversionary right, but salvation such as theirs was a privilege and could only be obtained by participation in the bounteous festival of the Athenian State and in its ceremonial. Centuries of large-minded tolerance in admitting to the mysteries extended this privilege to an immense number of Greeks (and of Romans, too, in later times). But the prospect of a blessed hereafter never became a matter of course; not as man, not even as a virtuous and pious man did such a privilege come to anyone. It was granted solely to the member of the Eleusinian religious society and the participator in the divine service of the goddesses.[27]
What were the means employed to impress this hope—this certain expectation rather—of a blessed hereafter in Hades upon the Mystai? We must frankly admit that we cannot, unfortunately, say anything definite in answer to this question. Only to the suggestion that these hopes were grounded upon symbolic representations of any kind may we give a decided denial. And yet this is the generally accepted opinion. “Symbols” there may have been, as an assistance to the dramatic or pantomimic representation of the Rape and Return of Korê;[28] but hardly in any other sense than that of typical condensations—the part being put for the whole, or the whole understood in the part—of scenes impossible to represent in their entirety. It is true that with the lapse of centuries, and in the absence of any official written interpretation of the inner meaning and intention of the ritual many of these symbols became unintelligible—a disadvantage which belonged to all other departments of Greek religion as well. As soon as independent reflexion on matters of religion began to arise, many sorts of allegorical or symbolical interpretations began to be applied to the details of the performances at the mysteries. Does it follow from this that the mysteries of the Earth divinities, as some are inclined to believe, bore a symbolical or allegorical character from the outset, and differed in this respect from all other Greek worship of the gods?[29] Similar interpretations were applied by philosophers or would-be philosophers to the fables of the gods in Homeric or popular mythology; the mysteries did not by any means hold a peculiar position in the minds of connoisseurs of myth-interpretation in antiquity. If a “deeper meaning” was attached by preference to the performances at Eleusis, that only shows that much in these performances was no longer understood, or in its real meaning no longer satisfied the spirit of the philosophic centuries. But it shows also that for this [227] festival of unexampled splendour, where night and the injunction of secrecy awakened awed expectancy,[30] performed according to an archaic ritual of ever-increasing perfection and attended by the whole of Greece, an unusual sympathy was felt. It offered something to the eye and the ear which was attractive to all men, and they exerted themselves to find a satisfactory meaning in its sights and sounds. Finally, it is likely enough that the “meaning” which they themselves had arbitrarily bestowed upon them was what made the mysteries specially attractive to many. To this extent it is legitimate to say that symbolism was a real and historical factor in the constitution of the mysteries.
Even supposing, however, that much in the presentation of this mystic festival was consciously ordered and disposed by the founders of it with a view to symbolic interpretation, and consequently to the possibility of an ever-increasing idealization of its significance, yet this cannot have extended to the hopes of a blessed immortality revealed to the Mystai. Symbolist or allegorizing modes of interpretation must always have been the private concern of individuals and therefore liable to much uncertainty and variety.[31] Our authorities, however, from the most diverse periods, speak with far too great distinctness and unanimity about the blessed hereafter vouchsafed to the initiated in the mysteries, for it to be credible that this can have been the outcome of any interpretation of complexities, or of any metaphorical application of the hopes derived from events in the life of the gods to a quite different province, the life of the human soul. What every witness speaks of in the plainest and simplest language without any special “mystery”—the hope of future blessedness—must have been offered to the participants in the mysteries in the most unequivocal fashion. It is natural, above all, to suppose that the exhibition of the “mystic drama” included particularly the final scene as it is sketched in the 2nd Homeric Hymn: the foundation of the Eleusinian festival by the goddess herself—what had once been revealed to the little city-community must have been proclaimed to the great company of those admitted to the common festival of Eleusis:[32] the highest reward of participation in this unparalleled act of worship is what the Homeric Hymn distinctly puts forth as such—the peculiar favour of the gods of the lower world and a future life of blessedness within their kingdom. The statues of the goddesses were seen radiantly illuminated;[33] at this festival of grace in remembrance of their trials, their happiness, and their beneficent acts, they [228] themselves—as it seemed to the faithful believer—were invisibly present. What further need of warrant was there for the promises of future blessedness?