On the left, in the immediate foreground, is part of the early girdle wall of the sacred precincts, above which is the edge of the Acropolis rock, with a chapel of the Panagia, and belfry above. To the right are bases of votive offerings. In the distance are the mountains of Attica.
their efficacy on the susceptibilities of the worshipper. Plutarch says that it required a philosophical training and a religious frame of mind to comprehend them, and Galen maintained that “the study of Nature, if prosecuted with the concentrated attention given to the Mysteries, is even more fitted than they are to reveal the power and wisdom of God, as these truths are less clearly expressed in the Mysteries than in Nature.”
There is no evidence that metempsychosis or transmigration of souls had any place in the rites, and they appear to have been free from the grossness of the Orphic and Phrygian Mysteries, as well as from the superstition associated with Pythagoreanism. It has been suggested that they may have been of Egyptian origin, and recently this theory has derived some support from the discovery of three Egyptian scarabs in the grave of a woman, who appears to have been a priestess, as more than sixty vases of various kinds were found buried with her, besides a great quantity of female jewellery, in gold and silver and bronze and iron.
The Eleusinian rites breathed quite a different spirit from the ordinary religion of the Greek, and as soon as they were over he resumed his enjoyment of the present world. There were games and theatrical performances on the last day before leaving Eleusis, and on the way back to Athens there were many ebullitions of mirth and wit, owing to the reaction from the unwonted solemnity and gloom.
We have a token of the sacredness attaching to the rites in the fact that one of the most solemn oaths which could be taken was in the name of Demeter and her daughter. It was regarded as an extreme aggravation of the guilt of Calippus, the Syracusan, who compassed the death of Dion, Plato’s friend, that, when he was suspected of a hostile design and challenged by Areté, Dion’s wife, he denied with an oath and went into the sacred grove, touching the purple robe of the goddess, and taking a lighted torch in his hand. To make the crime still worse, it was perpetrated on the very day sacred to these goddesses when the Coreia were celebrated, and it was through their initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries that the two men had become acquainted—showing how little impression may be made on some minds by the most solemn rites of religion. The Mysteries were open to women as well as to men, but not to slaves or Persians, or infamous persons such as murderers whose guilt had not been expiated.
