How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown close to the Hearth-fire of the universe—herself indeed just a little spark from it; despised and rejected; rejected by the world, despised by her two elder sisters (the body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though latest-born, by far the most beautiful of the three. And of the Prince of Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her wedding garment the glory and beauty of all nature and of the heavens! The parables of Jesus are charming in their way, but they hardly reach this height of inspiration.

Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange that here again there are three sisters (the three stages of human evolution), and the latest-born the most beautiful of the three, and the jealousies and persecutions heaped on the youngest by the others, and especially by Aphrodite the goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of the unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted for mortals to look; and the long, long tests and sufferings and trials which Psyche has to undergo before Eros may really take her to his arms and translate her to the heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these things were represented in the Mysteries the world flocked to see them, and the poets indeed said, “Happy are they that see and seeing can understand?” Can we not understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the second century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing the lesson that “the greatest of human blessings is fellowship and mutual trust”?

XV.
THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES

Thus we come to a thing which we must not pass over, because it throws great light on the meaning and interpretation of all these rites and ceremonies of the great World-religion. I mean the subject of the Ancient Mysteries. And to this I will give a few pages.

These Mysteries were probably survivals of the oldest religious rites of the Greek races, and in their earlier forms consisted not so much in worship of the gods of Heaven as of the divinities of Earth, and of Nature and Death. Crude, no doubt, at first, they gradually became (especially in their Eleusinian form) more refined and philosophical; the rites were gradually thrown open, on certain conditions, not only to men generally, but also to women, and even to slaves; and in the end they influenced Christianity deeply. (1)

(1) See Edwin Hatch, D.D., The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church (London, 1890), pp. 283-5.

There were apparently three forms of teaching made use of in these rites: these were [gr legomena], things SAID; [gr deiknumena], things SHOWN; and [gr drwmena], things PERFORMED or ACTED. (1) I have given already some instances of things said—texts whispered for consolation in the neophyte’s ear, and so forth; of the THIRD group, things enacted, we have a fair amount of evidence. There were ritual dramas or passion-plays, of which an important one dealt with the descent of Kore or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations, (2) and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in Spring; another with the sufferings of Psyche and her rescue by Eros, as described by Apuleius (3)—himself an initiate in the cult of Isis. There is a parody by Lucian, which tells of the birth of Apollo, the marriage of Coronis, and the coming of Aesculapius as Savior; there was the dying and rising again of Dionysus (chief divinity of the Orphic cult); and sometimes the mystery of the birth of Dionysus as a holy child. (4) There was, every year at Eleusis, a solemn and lengthy procession or pilgrimage made, symbolic of the long pilgrimage of the human soul, its sufferings and deliverance.

(1) Cheetham, op. cit., pp. 49-61 sq.

(2) See Farnell, op. cit., iii. 158 sq.

(3) See The Golden Ass.