Among the Australians, Dampier, in 1688, observed the singular unselfish generosity of distribution of food to the old, the weak, and the sick. According to Mr. Howitt, the boys of the Coast Murring tribe are taught in the Mysteries “to speak the straightforward truth while being initiated, and are warned to avoid various offences against propriety and morality.” The method of instruction is bad, a pantomimic representation of the sin to be avoided, but the intention is excellent. [{74b}] Among the Kurnai respect for the old, for unprotected women, the duty of unselfishness, and other ethical ideas are inculcated, [{74c}] while certain food taboos prevail during the rite, as was also the case in the Eleusinia. That this moral idea of “sharing what they have with their friends” is not confined merely to the tribe, is proved by the experience of John Finnegan, a white
man lost near Moreton Bay early in this century. “At all times, whether they had much or little, fish or kangaroo, they always gave me as much as I could eat.” Even when the whites stole the fish of the natives, and were detected, “instead of attempting to repossess themselves of the fish, they instantly set at work to procure more for us, and one or two fetched us as much dingowa as they could carry.” [{75}] The first English settlers in Virginia, on the other hand, when some native stole a cup, burned down the whole town.
Thus the morality of the savage is not merely tribal (as is often alleged), and is carried into practice, as well as inculcated, in some regions, not in all, during the Mysteries.
For these reasons, if the Greek Mysteries be survivals of savage ceremonies (as there is no reason to doubt that they are), the savage association of moral instruction with mummeries might survive as easily as
anything else. That it did survive is plain from numerous passages in classical authors. [{76a}] The initiate “live a pious life in regard to strangers and citizens.” They are to be “conscious of no evil”: they are to “protect such as have wrought no unrighteousness.” Such precepts “have their root in the ethico-religious consciousness.” [{76b}] It is not mere ritual purity that the Mysteries demand, either among naked Australians, or Yao, or in Greece. Lobeck did his best to minimise the testimony to the higher element in the Eleusinia, but without avail. The study of early, barbaric, savage, classical, Egyptian, or Indian religions should not be one-sided. Men have always been men, for good as well as for evil; and religion, almost everywhere, is allied with ethics no less than it is overrun by the parasite of myth, and the survival of magic in ritual. The Mother and the Maid were “Saviours” (Κορη Σωτειρα),
“holy” and “pure,” despite contradictory legends. [{77}] The tales of incest, as between Zeus and Persephone, are the result of the genealogical mania. The Gods were grouped in family-relationships, to account for their companionship in ritual, and each birth postulated an amour. None the less the same deities offered “salvation,” of a sort, and were patrons of conduct.
Greek religion was thus not destitute of certain chief elements in our own. But these were held in solution, with a host of other warring elements, lustful, cruel, or buffooning. These elements Greece was powerless to shake off; philosophers, by various expedients, might explain away the contradictory myths which overgrew the religion, but ritual, the luck of the State, and popular credulity, were tenacious of the whole strange mingling of beliefs and practices.
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The view taken of the Eleusinia in this
note is hardly so exalted as that of Dr. Hatch. “The main underlying conception of initiation was that there were elements in human life from which the candidate must purify himself before he could be fit to approach God.” The need of purification, ritual and moral, is certain, but one is not aware of anything in the purely popular or priestly religion of Greece which exactly answers to our word “God” as used in the passage cited. Individuals, by dint of piety or of speculation, might approach the conception, and probably many did, both in and out of the philosophic schools. But traditional ritual and myth could scarcely rise to this ideal; and it seems exaggerated to say of the crowded Eleusinian throng of pilgrims that “the race of mankind was lifted on to a higher plane when it came to be taught that only the pure in heart can see God.” [{78}] The black native boys in Australia pass through a