46 Essay on the Demon of Socrates. See also Pansanias, lib. ix. cap. xxxix.
The flowers are gone, the birds are gone, the gentle breezes are gone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people of dreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soars into new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens on the heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surely returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus, is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart, enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized by poets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestly societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah and his ark.
The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold; and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The first object was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence of a doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearful looking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerable proportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be traced to the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations and terrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the good and obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and glorious rewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near the close of his letter of consolation to her,) "Some say the soul will be entirely insensible after death; but you are too well acquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries of Bacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such an error." The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, the secret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions, thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish its doctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus to increase the power of the priesthood and the state. To compass these ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vague superstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resources available by the ancient world, were marshalled and brought to bear in the Mysteries. By chemical and mechanical secrets then in their exclusive possession, the mystagogues worked miracles before the astonished novices.47 They had the powers of electricity, gunpowder, hydrostatic pressure, at their command.48 Their rites were carried out on the most magnificent scale. The temple at Eleusis could hold thirty thousand persons. Imagine what effect might be produced, under such imposing and prepared circumstances, on an ignorant multitude, by a set of men holding all the scientific secrets and mechanical inventions till then discovered, illumination flashing after darkness successively before their smitten eyes, the floors seeming to heave and the walls to crack, thunders bellowing through the mighty dome; now yawning revealed beneath them the ghostly chimera of Tartarus, with all the shrieking and horrid scenery gathered there; now
47 Anthon's Class. Dict., art. "Elicius."
48 Salverte, Des Sciences Occultes, ou Essai sur la Magie. See also editor's introduction to Thomson's Eng. trans. of Salverte's work.
the mild beauties of Elysium dawning on their ravished vision, amid strains of celestial music, through fading clouds of glory, while nymphs, heroes, and gods walked apparent. Clement of Alexandria tells us that one feature of the initiation was a display of the grisly secrets of Hades.49 Apuleius, in his account of his own initiation, says, "At midnight I saw the sun shining with a resplendent light; and I manifestly drew near to the lower and to the upper gods and adored them in immediate presence." 50 Lobeck says that, on the lifting of the veil exposing the adytum to the gaze of the initiates, apparitions of the gods appeared to them.51 Christie, in his little work on the Greek Mysteries, says that the doctrines of the Eleusinian shows were explained by means of transparent scenes, many of which were faithfully copied upon the painted Greek vases; and these vase accordingly, were deposited in tombs to evidence the faith of the deceased in a future life. The foregoing conceptions may be illustrated by the dramatic representations, scenic shadows behind transparent curtains, in Java, alluded to by Sir Stamford Raffles.52
It is remarkable how far the Mysteries spread over the earth, and what popularity they attained. They penetrated into almost every nation under the sun. They admitted, in some degree, nearly the whole people. Herodotus informs us that there were collected in Egypt, at one celebration, seven hundred thousand men and women, besides children.53 The greatest warriors and kings Philip, Alexander, Sulla, Antony esteemed it an honor to be welcomed within the mystic pale. "Men," says Cicero, "came from the most distant shores to be initiated at Eleusis." Sophocles declares, as quoted by Warburton, "True life is to be found only among the initiates: all other places are full of evil." At the rise of the Christian religion, all the life and power left in the national religion of Greece and Rome were in the Mysteries. Accordingly, here was the most formidable foe of the new faith. Standing in its old entrenchments, with all its popular prestige around it, it fought with desperate determination for every inch it was successively forced to yield. The brilliant effort of Julian to roll back the tide of Christianity and restore the pagan religion to more than its pristine splendor an effort beneath which the scales of the world's fortunes poised, tremulous, for a while was chiefly an endeavor to revive and enlarge the Mysteries. Such was the attachment of the people to these old rites even in the middle of the fourth century of the Christian era, that a murderous riot broke out at Alexandria, in which Bishop George and others were slain, on occasion of the profanation by Christians of a secret adytum in which the Mysteries of Mithra were celebrated.54 And when, a little later, the Emperor Valentinian had determined to suppress all nocturnal rites, he was induced to withdraw his resolution by Pretextatus, proconsul in Greece, "a man endowed with every virtue, who represented to him that the
49 Stromata, lib. iii., cited by a writer on the Mysteries in Blackwood, Feb. 1853, pp. 201-203.
50 Taylor's trans. of Golden Ass, p. 283. In a note to p. 275 of this work, the translator describes (with a citation of his authorities) "the breathing resemblances of the gods used in the Mysteries, statues fabricated by the telesta, so as to be illuminated and to appear animated."
51 Aglaophamus, lib. i. sect. 7.