Homelier memories centre in the Spring of Fair Dances (Callichorus), now identified. Here, Pausanias tells us, “the Eleusinian women first danced and sang in honour of the goddess,” decked perhaps like the Doric maidens whose worship of the same goddess charmed the eyes of Alcman:—
“We came to great Demeter’s fane, we nine,
All maidens, all in goodly raiment clad;
In goodly raiment clad, with necklace bright
Of carven ivory, a radiant gleam.”
A fortunate dream prevented Pausanias from relating to the uninitiated what he saw within the sacred precinct. In unpoisoned content, therefore, lured by the beauty of the “white spring” which Callimachus, the Alexandrian, included among Demeter’s gifts, the modern traveller may sit on the temple steps and abandon thought, even as many an ancient mystic in the autumnal days between the holy nights must have mounted to some place of outlook whence he could watch the deep blue sea break into foam delicate and white as the face of Persephone.
The mysteries ended on the 24th, with a public festival. At Athens games were held, called the Eleusinia, offering as a prize a measure of barley reaped from the field of Rharos close to the walls of Eleusis where the first seed corn had fructified. In later times, with the general increase of holidays, this festival was prolonged, but in the greatest days of Athens the procession of mystics returned to the city on the 25th, with ceremonies of farewell to Persephone now leaving her mother to return to her gloomy lord, like summer nearing the embrace of winter; and with some final ritual, performed, it may be, at the Dipylon Gate rather than at Eleusis, of prayer to sky and earth that the one might impregnate and the other bear. On the curb of a sacred well before the city gate has been found the very ancient formula, not yet outlived by the generations of men who live upon the fruits of the earth.
The day of return gave one last opportunity for a public demonstration—this time of hilarity. Justified by the quips and cranks of Iambe, the initiates yielded to the impulse which in the natural man follows close upon exaltation. At the bridge over the Cephisus the people of the city, wearing masks, met the procession, and a carnival of scurrilous wit ensued, which was a savoury memory to Aristophanes’s mystics in the world of shadows. To us the recollection may bring a sudden distrust of the sympathy with the past which, within the unfretted silence of Eleusis, seemed completely to possess us. Like the spectators in the comedy we get a whiff of pork. The light of the torches reveals the vulgarities of a revelling crowd. The cymbals of the priests, clashed only at this spot, drown the voices “of no tone.” Is it, after all, true, as the early Christians believed, that orgies, not prayers, have busied these men and women?
But with the crossing of the bridge the mood vanishes. The western sun is once more adorning the Athenian Acropolis. Not only Pindar and Plato faced this hill with a new reverence after their Eleusinian nights, but many a simpler man and woman must have come home comforted and hopeful to take up old burdens on the morrow. If, viewed by a Plato from the heights of “true philosophy,” thousands who came from Eleusis were still blind, or only partially aware of the meaning of life and death, this was but the Greek manifestation of a universal fact: “Many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the mystics.”