“Here first the fruitful corn upreared its bristling ears.”
The historical development of the Eleusinian mysteries naturally followed the general development of Greek religious thought. To the primitive duality of Demeter and Persephone was added Dionysus, lord of the elements, when he had once been accepted by the Athens of Pisistratus. At Eleusis he appeared as the child Iacchus. Later, under the influences of the strange school of thought known as “Orphic,” at once mystical and gross, this multiple god became Zagreus, through whose savage death man, otherwise destined to be forever brute, came to partake of the divine nature. But in all periods the mysteries “were founded on the adoration of nature, its forces and phenomena, conceived rather than observed, interpreted by the imagination and not by reason, transformed into divine figures and histories by a kind of theological poetry which went off into pantheism on the one side and into anthropomorphism on the other.”
In this theological poetry the position of power was held by the long Homeric Hymn to Demeter, although it antedates the presence of Iacchus at Eleusis and at least overlooks the importance of Triptolemus, the young prince of the city, to whom the Earth-Mother gave the first seed-corn and the commission to teach the art of husbandry throughout the world. The representation of this act was left for fifth century sculpture, if we may so interpret the beautiful relief discovered at Eleusis and preserved in the National Museum. Nor is there more than casual mention of Eumolpus, the legendary first priest and the eponymous ancestor of the priestly family in Athens which was charged with the care of Demeter’s worship. But the Hymn told flawlessly the central story of Demeter and Persephone: the ravishment of Persephone by Hades as she was picking roses and crocuses, violets and irises and the marvelous narcissus which the earth bore to be her snare; the grief of Demeter as she heard the mountain peaks and the deep sea echo her child’s cry, her wandering search, her unrecognised sojourn at fragrant Eleusis in the courteous household of the king, and her retarding of the fruits of the earth; the reunion of mother and daughter for two thirds of the year, and the sending up once more of the grain from the rich fields and the burgeoning of the leaves and flowers; and, finally, the command of the Goddess that the people of Eleusis should build her a great temple and an altar below the town and the steep wall, above the spring Callichorus on the jutting rock.
Homer himself had not known this story. Hesiod had lacked the Ionic gift to tell it. Euripides, in a later generation, was led astray by his strain of Orphic imagination which needed the roar of rivers and the thunder of the sea, the wail of flutes and the clatter of the tambourine to mark the frenzy of a suffering godhead. The Greeks as a people preferred a story in which nature perishes and blooms again, in which grief and love fight with death, while the dignity of life is unassailed, and the beauty of hills and sea, flowers and welling springs irradiates its tragedies.
Only the external facts concerning the celebrations are open to us. The secrets of the two successive initiations, one preparatory to the other, were so jealously hidden by the ancient initiates that the keenest scholarship has not been able to discover them in literature or in art. Alcibiades, idolized as he was, could not secure acquittal from the suspicion of having parodied the mysteries. Silence was enjoined by religion, enforced by law. This reserve about holy things, which has appealed to some moderns as the “chief lesson and culminating grace derived from Eleusis,” was proclaimed not only as a necessary condition but also as an integral part of initiation, “imitating,” as Strabo expressed it, “the nature of the godhead which is forever eluding our senses.” Knowledge of the outward events of the festival has been painstakingly gathered from passages in Athenian literature, a few inscriptions, the excavated ruins, vases and other works of art, and from the controversial literature, both Christian and pagan, of the early centuries of our era.
The “Mysteries” lasted nine days, the time of Demeter’s wanderings. Prior to them the youths—ephebi—of Athens went to Eleusis and brought thence certain sacred objects which were to be used in the later procession. On the 15th of Boedromion, or September, near the time of sowing, the “mystæ,” who in the early spring month of Anthesterion, the season of planting, had participated in the Lesser Mysteries in a suburb of Athens, were assembled at the Stoa Pœcile to listen to sundry proclamations. The following day was one of purification. The cry went out, “seawards, O mystæ,” and every candidate washed himself and his sacrificial pig in the bay near Eleusis, following the Greek feeling that the sea purges from the evils of earth. For two more days sacrifices were carried on at Athens. And then on the 19th or the 20th came the great procession to escort the image of the child Iacchus, myrtle-crowned and carrying in his hand a torch, back to his Eleusinian home. The day was a public holiday. Great crowds gathered along the Sacred Way to watch the long line of ephebi, mystics, priests and officials, who, wearing myrtle and bearing torches, left the Dipylon Gate early in the morning and reached the precinct at Eleusis after nightfall, when the mysterious shadows were dispelled only by the yellow glare of thousands upon thousands of torches and by the lights that streamed from the sacred buildings.
The modern highroad follows very nearly the Sacred Way. Few travellers now brave the heat and dust of an Attic September, but in some “month of flowers” gain their impressions of the beauty of the road, which still leads over the Cephisus, past gray-green olive groves, up through the pine-clad pass of Mount Ægaleus, and down again to wind closely beside the curved shore of the sea. In antiquity the Sacred Way was lined with tombs and temples and shrines. Moderns are detained only by the lovely mediæval Convent of Daphne, at the top of the pass, but the ancient procession lingered not only at the Temple of Apollo which occupied this spot, but at many other sacred stations, to offer sacrifices, sing hymns, and engage in dances, solemn or joyous or wild. This was the reason for leaving Athens so early to cover only thirteen miles before another sunrise. The last part of the way followed the “torchlit strand” by night. The “voices of the night,” the moving feet of the multitude owned Iacchus as lord, with whom the stars also danced, the stars whose breath is fire. And to the stars of Sophocles Euripides added the elemental joy of moon and sea:—
“When the stars of the ether of Zeus lead out,
And the moon glides on as the dancers’ queen,
And the daughters of Nereus join the rout