The third was occupied with offerings, expiatory sacrifices, and other religious rites, such as fasting, mourning, continence, etc. A mullet was immolated, and offerings of grain and living animals made.
On the fourth they carried in procession the mystic wreath of flowers, representing that which Proserpine dropped when seized by Pluto, and the Crown of Ariadne in the Heavens. It was borne on a triumphal car drawn by oxen; and women followed bearing mystic chests or boxes, wrapped with purple cloths, containing grains of sesame, pyramidal biscuits, salt, pomegranates and the mysterious serpent, and perhaps the mystic phallus.
On the fifth was the superb procession of torches, commemorative of the search for Proserpine by Ceres; the Initiates marching by trios, and each bearing a torch; while at the head of the procession marched the Dadoukos.
The sixth was consecrated to Iakchos, the young Light-God, son of Ceres, reared in the sanctuaries and bearing the torch of the Sun-God. The chorus in Aristophanes terms him the luminous star that lights the nocturnal initiation. He was brought from the sanctuary, his head crowned with myrtle, and borne from the gate of the Ceramicus to Eleusis, along the sacred way, amid dances, sacred songs, every mark of joy, and mystic cries of Iakchos.
On the seventh there were gymnastic exercises and combats, the victors in which were crowned and rewarded.
On the eighth was the feast of Æsculapius.
On the ninth the famous libation was made for the souls of the departed. The Priests, according to Athenæus, filled two vases, placed one in the East and one in the West, toward the gates of day and night, and overturned them, pronouncing a formula of mysterious prayers. Thus they invoked Light and Darkness, the two great principles of nature.
During all these days no one could be arrested, nor any suit brought, on pain of death, or at least a heavy fine: and no one was allowed, by the display of unusual wealth or magnificence, to endeavor to rival this sacred pomp. Everything was for religion.
Such were the Mysteries; and such the Old Thought, as in scattered and widely separated fragments it has come down to us. The human mind still speculates upon the great mysteries of nature, and still finds its ideas anticipated by the ancients, whose profoundest thoughts are to be looked for, not in their philosophies, but in their symbols, by which they endeavored to express the great ideas that vainly struggled for utterance in words, as they viewed the great circle of phenomena,—Birth, Life, Death, or Decomposition, and New Life out of Death and Rottenness,—to them the greatest of mysteries. Remember, while you study their symbols, that they had a profounder sense of these wonders than we have. To them the transformations of the worm were a greater wonder than the stars; and hence the poor dumb scarabæus or beetle was sacred to them. Thus their faiths are condensed into symbols or expanded into allegories, which they understood, but were not always able to explain in language; for there are thoughts and ideas which no language ever spoken by man has words to express.
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