And the same doctrine seems to be the motif of many other popular legends and of mysteries founded thereon; its settings and its harmonies may be different, but the essential melody is the same. At Eleusis Demeter’s daughter was the representative of mankind, for she went down to the house of Hades as is the lot of men. But Crete had another legend wherein Demeter was the representative deity with whom mankind might hope for union. Was it not told how Iasion even in this life found such favour in the goddess’ eyes that she was ‘wed with him in sweet love mid the fresh-turned furrows of the fat land of Crete[1452]’? And happiness such as was granted to him here was laid up for all the initiated hereafter; else would there be no meaning in those lines, ‘Blessed, methinks, is the lot of him that sleeps, and tosses not, nor turns, even Endymion; and, dearest maiden, blessed I call Iasion, whom such things befell, as ye that be profane shall never come to know[1453].’ Surely that which is withheld from the profane is by implication reserved to the sanctified, and to them it is promised that they shall know by their own experience hereafter the bliss which Iasion even here obtained. It was, I think, in this spirit and this belief that the Athenians in old time called their dead Δημητρεῖοι ‘Demeter’s folk[1454]’; for the popular belief in the condescension of the Mistress, great and reverend goddess though she was, was so firmly rooted, it would seem, that even to this day the folk-stories, as we have seen, still tell how the ‘Mistress of the earth and of the sea,’ she whom men still call Despoina and reverence for her love of righteousness and for her stern punishment of iniquity, has yet admitted brave heroes to her embrace in the mountain-cavern where, as of old in Arcady, she still dwells[1455].
Nor did the cults of Demeter and Kore monopolise these hopes and beliefs. In the religious drama of Aphrodite and Adonis, in the Sabazian mysteries, in the holiest rites of Dionysus, in the wild worship of Cybele, the same thought seems ever to recur. It matters little whether these gods and their rites were foreign or Hellenic in origin. If they were not native, at least they were soon naturalised, and that for the simple reason that they satisfied the religious cravings of the Greek race. The essential spirit of their worship, whatever the accidents of form and expression, was the spirit of the old Pelasgian worship of Demeter; and therefore, though Dionysus may have been an immigrant from northern barbarous peoples, the Greeks did not hesitate to give him room and honour beside Demeter in the very sanctuary of Eleusis. Similar, we may well believe, was the lot of other foreign gods and rites. Whencesoever derived, they owed their reception in Greece to the fact that their character appealed to certain native religious instincts of the Greek folk. Once transplanted to Hellenic soil, they were soon completely Hellenized; those elements which were foreign or distasteful to Greek religion were quickly eradicated or of themselves faded into oblivion, while all that accorded with the Hellenic spirit throve into fuller perfection; for the character of a deity and of a cult depends ultimately upon the character of the worshippers.
It is fair therefore to treat of Aphrodite as of a genuinely Greek deity; for, though she may have entered Greece from Eastern lands, doubtless long before the Homeric age her worship no less than her personality was permeated with the spirit of genuinely Greek religion. Too well known to need re-telling here is the story of how—to use the words of Theocritus once more—‘the beautiful Cytherea was brought by Adonis, as he pastured his flock upon the mountain-side, so far beyond the verge of frenzy, that not even in his death doth she put him from her bosom[1456].’ Such was the plot of one of the most famous religious dramas of old time. And what was its moral for those who had ears to hear? Surely that the beloved of the gods may hope for wedlock with them in death.
It was certainly in this sense that Clement of Alexandria understood certain other mysteries of Aphrodite, though, needless to say, he puts upon them the most obscene construction. After relating in terms unnecessarily disgusting the legend of how by the very act of Uranus’ self-mutilation the sea became pregnant and gave birth from among its foam to the goddess Aphrodite, he states that ‘in the rites which celebrate this voluptuousness of the sea, as a token of the goddess’ birth there are handed to those that are being initiated into the lore of adultery (τοῖς μυουμένοις τὴν τέχνην τὴν μοιχικήν) a lump of salt and a phallus; and they for their part present her with a coin, as if they were her lovers and she their mistress (ὡς ἑταίρας ἐρασταί)[1457].’ Thus Clement; but those who are willing to see in the mysteries of the Greek religion something more than organised sensuality will do well to reflect whether that which Clement calls ‘being initiated into the lore of adultery’ was not really an initiation into those hopes of marriage with the gods of which we have already found evidence in the popular religion, and whether the goddess’ symbolic acceptance of her worshippers as lovers does not fit in exactly with that bold conception of man’s future bliss. The symbolism indeed, if Clement’s statement is accurate, was crude and even repellent, but its significance is clear; and those who approached these mysteries of Aphrodite in reverent mood need not have been repelled by that which modern taste would account indecent in the ritual. Greek feeling never erred on the side of prudery; men were familiar with the Hermae erected in the streets and with the symbolism of the phallus in religious ceremonies, and tolerated the publication of literature—be it the comedy of Aristophanes or Clement’s own exhortation to the heathen—which neither as a source of amusement nor of instruction would be tolerated now.
The particular mysteries to which Clement alludes in this passage seem to have been concerned with the story of Aphrodite’s birth, and though it is difficult to conjecture how that story can have been made to illustrate and to inculcate the doctrine of the marriage of men and gods, the information given by Clement with respect to the ritual makes it clear that such was their object. But in that other rite of the same goddess, that namely which celebrated the story of Adonis, the whole motif of the drama was the continuance of Aphrodite’s love for him after his death, a love so strong that it prevailed upon the gods of the lower world to let him return for half of every year to the upper world and the arms of his mistress. Here, though expressed in different imagery, is the same doctrine as that which underlay the drama of Eleusis. Here again is an illustration, or rather, for those who were capable of religious ecstasy, a proof, of the doctrine that the dead yet lived, and in that life were both in body and in soul one with their gods. For ‘thrice-beloved Adonis who even in Acheron is beloved[1458]’ was the type and forerunner of all those who had part in his mysteries.
In another version this legend of Adonis is brought into even closer relation with the Eleusinian mysteries by the introduction of Persephone[1459]. To her is assigned the part of a rival to Aphrodite, and being equally enamoured of the beautiful Adonis she is glad of his death whereby he is torn from the arms of Aphrodite in the upper world, and enters the chamber of the nether world where her love in turn may have its will; but in the end Aphrodite descends to the house of Hades, and a compact is arranged between the two goddesses by which each in turn may possess Adonis for half the year. This version of the story is cruder, but its teaching is obviously the same—Adonis, the favourite of heaven in this life, and the precursor of all who by initiation in the mysteries win heaven’s favour, survives in the lower world with both body and soul unimpaired by death, and is admitted to wedlock with the great goddess of the dead.
The same doctrine again seems to have been the basis of certain mystic rites associated with Dionysus. From the speech against Neaera attributed to Demosthenes we learn that at Athens there was annually celebrated a marriage between the wife of the chief magistrate (ἄρχων βασιλεύς) and Dionysus. The solemnity was reckoned among things ‘unspeakable’; foreigners were not permitted to see or to hear anything of it; and even Athenian citizens, it seems, might not enter the innermost sanctuary in which the union of Dionysus with the ‘queen’ (βασίλιννα) was celebrated[1460]. There were however present and assisting in some way fourteen priestesses (γεραραί), dedicated to the service of the god and bound by special vows of chastity. These priestesses, we are told, corresponded in number to the altars of Dionysus[1461], and they were appointed by the archon whose wife was wed with Dionysus[1462]. There our actual knowledge of the facts ends; but there is material enough on which to base a rational surmise. The correspondence between the number of priestesses bound by vows of purity and the number of the altars suggests that in this custom is to be sought a relic of human sacrifice. The selection of the priestesses by the magistrate who held the title of ‘king’ suggests that in bygone times it had been the duty of the king, as being also chief priest, to select fourteen virgins who should be sacrificed on Dionysus’ altars and thereby sent to him as wives. Subsequently maybe, as humanity gradually mitigated the wilder rites of religion, the number of victims was reduced to one; and later still the human sacrifice was altogether abolished, and, instead of sending to Dionysus his wife by the road of death, the still pious but now more humane worshippers of the god contented themselves with a symbolic marriage between him and the wife of their chief magistrate.
The conception of human sacrifice as a means of sending a messenger from this world to some power above, which receives clear expression in that modern story from Santorini which I have narrated in an earlier chapter[1463], was, I have there argued, known also to the ancient Greeks; and the same means of communication may equally well have been employed for the despatch of a human wife to some god. Plutarch appears to have been actually familiar with this idea. In a passage in which he is attempting to vindicate the purity and goodness of the gods and, it must be added withal, their aloofness from human affairs, he claims that all the religious rites and means of communion are concerned, not with the great gods (θεοί), but with lesser deities (δαίμονες) who are of varying character, some good, others evil, and that the rites also vary accordingly. “As regards the mysteries,” he says, “wherein are given the greatest manifestations or representations (ἐμφάσεις καὶ διαφάσεις) of the truth concerning ‘daemons,’ let my lips be reverently sealed, as Herodotus has it”; but the wilder orgies of religion, he argues, are to be set down as a means of appeasing evil ‘daemons’ and of averting their wrath; the human sacrifices of old time, for example, were not demanded nor accepted by gods, but were performed to satisfy either the vindictive anger of cruel and tormenting ‘daemons,’ or in some cases “the wild and despotic passions (ἔρωτας) of ‘daemons’ who could not and would not have carnal intercourse with carnal beings. Just as Heracles besieged Oechalia to win a girl, so these strong and violent ‘daemons,’ demanding a human soul that is shut up within a body, and being unable to have bodily intercourse therewith, bring pestilences and famines upon cities and stir up wars and tumults, until they get and enjoy the object of their love.” And reversely, he continues, some ‘daemons’ have punished with death men who have forced their love upon them; and he refers to the story of a man who violated a nymph and was found afterwards with his head severed from his body[1464]. The whole passage betrays clearly enough what was the popular belief which Plutarch here set himself so to explain as to safeguard the goodness of the gods; but perhaps the end of it is the most significant of all. Plutarch forgets that a nymph, if she is a ‘daemon,’ is by his own hypothesis incapable of bodily intercourse; in this case then his attempted explanation is not even logically sound, and his conception of a purely spiritual ‘daemon’ is a failure; but at the same time, save for this invention, he is following the popular belief of both ancient and modern Greece that carnal intercourse between man and nymph is possible but is fraught with grave peril to the man[1465]. It is impossible then to doubt that in the earlier part of the passage he was explaining away a popular belief by means of the same hypothesis. He himself would hold that spiritual ‘daemons’ demanded human sacrifice because they lusted after a soul or spirit confined out of their reach in a body until death severed it therefrom; but the popular belief, which he is at pains to emend, was that corporeal gods demanded human sacrifice because they lusted after the person who, by death, would be sent, body and soul, to be wed with them.
There is good reason then to suppose that in old time death may have been even inflicted as the means of effecting wedlock between men and gods; and that the mystic rite of union between Dionysus and the wife of the Athenian magistrate was based on the same fundamental idea as the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone or of Aphrodite. Though in this instance, when once human sacrifice had been given up, all suggestion of death was, so far as we know, removed from the solemnity, yet the repetition year by year of a ceremony of marriage between the god and a mortal woman representing his worshippers might still keep bright in their minds those ‘happier hopes’ of the like bliss laid up for themselves hereafter.
This particular rite escaped the notice, or at any rate the malice, of Clement; but Dionysus does not for all that go unscathed. Clement fastens upon a legend concerning him, which, however widely ancient Greek feeling in the matter of sex differed from modern, cannot but have seemed to some of the ancients[1466] themselves to be a reproach and stain upon the honour of their god. The story of Dionysus and Prosymnus, as told by Clement[1467], must be taken as read. But those who will investigate it for themselves will see that the same idea of death being followed by close intercourse with the gods is present there also. That this was the inner meaning of the peculiarly offensive story is shown by a curious comment of Heraclitus upon it, which Clement quotes—ωὐτὸς δε Ἀίδης καὶ Διόνυσος[1468], ‘Hades and Dionysus are one’; whence it follows that union with Dionysus is a synonym for that ‘marriage with Hades’ which elsewhere, in both ancient and modern times, is a common presentment of death.