CHAPTER VII

.

THE UNION OF GODS AND MEN.

The similitude of death with sleep is an idea of ancient date and of wide distribution, which for many of mankind, whatever be the creed professed, has mitigated the fears or lightened the uncertainties which attach to the cessation of this life. Adopted by the founder of the Christian religion as an illustration of the doctrine that men ‘shall rise again with their bodies,’ the thought has become a part of the heritage of Christendom, and in our own language the word ‘cemetery’ bears testimony to it. But the idea had been evolved by pagan thought long centuries before the dawn of Christianity, and probably enough by the thinkers and poets of many nations independently one of another. In the oldest literature of Greece we meet with the thought already fully developed and evidently familiar. ‘To sleep an iron slumber[1358]’ is already in Homeric language a simple and natural synonym for ‘to die’; and so too we are told that in the far off golden age men ‘died as it were overborne by sleep[1359].’ And in yet plainer terms, where Death and Sleep are personified, they are spoken of as twin brethren[1360], the children of Night[1361]. This conception seems too to have been a favourite in art[1362], and provided one of the scenes on the renowned chest of Cypselus[1363].

When we turn to the folk-songs of the present day, we cannot of course hope to find the imagery of Death and Sleep pourtrayed as infants sleeping in the lap of Night, nor indeed, so far as I know, are they even described as brothers; for the personification of them by the modern peasants is rare. But the old resemblance between them is still recognised, and, quite apart from Christian influence, the thought finds natural expression in those largely pagan improvisations of mourning in which the name of Charon is to be heard more frequently than the name of God. It will suffice to quote but one stanza from one of the most simple and touching of these funeral-songs:

δὲν εἶν’ πεθαμένη, τὴν ὄψι τηρᾶτε, κοιμᾶται, κοιμᾶται, εἰς ὕπνο βαθύ[1364].

Not dead lies the maiden, Doubt not, but behold her, ’Tis sleep doth enfold her In slumber profound.

Now this idea, born in some long-forgotten pagan age, fostered by Homer and Hesiod and no less tenderly by the Christian Church, familiar to every Greek mind for full three thousand years, harmonizes well with the belief that body as well as soul survives death. Beyond the superficial resemblance in the inert figures of the dead man laid out for burial and of one who sleeps soundly, there was another and profounder resemblance in the manner of their waking to fresh

## activity, the one in this world, the other in the under-world. Homer,

with his belief that the soul alone, survives, notes only the first resemblance. The twofold property of laying men to sleep and of raising them therefrom resided fitly in the wand of Hermes the escorter of the dead; but though he escorted men’s souls to the house of Hades and might at will summon their souls thence[1365], there is no suggestion of a bodily awakening from the sleep of death. But Virgil, even in his close imitation of Homer, adds to the Homeric description of Hermes’ wand one phrase of his own. ‘Therewith doth he summon forth from Orcus the pale spirits of the dead, and others doth he send down to gloomy Tartarus; therewith he giveth sleep and taketh it away’--so far does Virgil follow Homer, but he adds--‘and unsealeth men’s eyes from death[1366].’ The Homeric picture is enriched by a new thought, foreign to the Achaean religion but proper to that other belief which inspired Pindar’s description of the future life, the thought that after death and dissolution, men’s eyes should open upon a brighter world and a life of renewed bodily activity.

Such was the thought with which the pagans of ancient Greece had comforted themselves long before Christianity availed itself of the same imagery. But the Hellenic religion went yet further, and found in this thought not only peace and contentment but vivid joy. The sleep of death was the means whereby men should attain to closer communion with their gods. The grave was a bed, but a bed of delight rather than of rest, a bridal bed. They should not sleep alone, but in the very embrace of the gods to whom in this life they had striven to draw nigh. The darkness of the tomb was but the wedding-night. Full union in the other world should be the consummation of partial communion in this. The marriage of men with their gods was the ideal to which Greek piety dared aspire.

Such an ideal may well seem bold even to the verge of impious presumption. But Greek religion, even in its highest developments, was the natural and spontaneous expression of the beliefs and hopes of a whole people; it differed from all the great religions of the modern world in having no founder. Great teachers no doubt arose, as Orpheus or Pythagoras, who influenced the course of religious thought; but they were not the founders of new religions. The old self-grown faiths of the people were the stocks upon which they grafted, as it would seem, even their new doctrines; they founded schools indeed, but schools which did not sever themselves from the received religion and become sects. The Orphic mysteries differed so little from the old Pelasgian mysteries of Eleusis that Orpheus was sometimes even reputed to be their founder too; yet, as we shall see, the Eleusinian rites were merely one presentment of a conception common to the whole Greek people. If then this ideal of marriage between men and gods in the future life was no invented or imported doctrine, but simply the highest development of purely popular aspirations towards close communion with the gods, its audacity is less surprising. From time immemorial down to this day[1367] Greece has had its popular stories of nuptial union even in this life between gods and mortal women, between goddesses and mortal men; and educated Greeks, who could not credit such occurrences in their own times, might well believe that a joy, which had been granted to the brave men and fair women of a former and better age even during their life-time upon earth, was still reserved for the righteous in the world to come. Pausanias tells us with a wonderful simplicity that in his time owing to the increase of iniquity in all the world no one was changed from a man into a god, and that the wrath of the gods against the unrighteous was laid up against the time when they should quit this earth[1368]. If then there was believed to be a postponement of punishment for those who offended the gods, there might well be a reservation of blessedness for those who pleased them. It would have imposed no strain upon the faith of such as Pausanias to look forward to the enjoyment in a future life of the same bliss as had been enjoyed in old time upon earth by men ‘who by reason of their uprightness and piety sat at the same hospitable board as gods, and whom the gods openly visited with honour for their goodness even as they visited the wicked with their displeasure[1369],’ men who, as many an old legend told, had shared not the board only but even the bed of deities.

This curious Greek conception of death as a form of marriage was first borne in upon me by the funeral-dirges of the modern peasants. Examples may be found in any collection of Greek folk-songs. The actual expression of the thought varies considerably, but it would probably be hard to find in Greece any professional mourner in whose elaborations the idea did not occupy an important place. It is utilised with equal frequency in regard to persons of either sex, whether married or unmarried at the time of death. The two following specimens from Passow’s collection are fairly representative.

‘Ah me! ah me! the hours of youth and days all past and over, Haply shall they return again, those hours of youth regretted?’ ‘Nay when the crow dons plumage white, when crow to dove is changèd, Then only shall they come again, those hours of youth lamented.’ ‘Oh fare ye well, high mountain-tops and fir-trees rich in shadow, For I must go to marry me, to take a wife unto me; The black earth for my wife I take, the tombstone as her mother And yonder little pebbles all her brethren and her sisters[1370].’

Here evidently we have the funeral-dirge of an old man, and, as is usual in these poems, a large part of the words are put into his mouth. In this fragment the first two lines are the dead man’s complaint, the next two are an answer returned to him, and then again he takes up his parable. The second example which I will give is from a lamentation for a young girl. The first few lines are addressed by the father and mother to their dead child, and with a quaint directness contrast the gloom of the lower world with the simple joys of a peasant’s life here above; while the last three lines are an answer put into the dead girl’s mouth.

‘Dear child, there where thou purposest to hie thee down, in Hades, There, sure, no cock doth ever crow, nor hen is heard a-clucking, There is no spring of water found, nor grass in meadows growing. Art hungered? nought thou tastest there; athirst? there nought thou drinkest; Would’st lay thee down and take thy rest? of sleep no fill thou takest. Then stay, dear child, in thine own house, stay then with thine own kindred.’ ‘Nay, I may not, dear father mine and mother deep-beloved, Yesterday was my marriage-day, late yestere’en my wedding, Hades I for my husband have, the tomb for my new mother[1371].’

In this dirge, it may be noticed, there is no complaint on the part of the dead girl; the lamentation and the gloomy description of Hades are assigned to her parents. And indeed her reply is, I think, intended to be by way of consolation. It is true that she does not deny their cheerless prognostications nor attempt to paint a brighter picture of the nether world, but she represents her death as no greater breaking of old ties than is marriage; at an actual marriage indeed the same kind of distressful presages are chanted by the girl’s companions, and even the bride herself is bound by propriety to exhibit a sullen and regretful demeanour. Very true of Greek marriages and of Greek funerals is the proverb, μηδ’ ἀπὸ τὴ λύπη λείπουν γέλια μηδ’ ἀπὸ τὴ χαρὰ τὰ κλάμματα[1372], ‘Mourning hath its mirth and joy its tears.’ But the consolatory tone is far more pronounced in some other passages from the same collection. A good example is found in the message which a _Klepht_--one of those patriot-outlaws who struggled against Turkish domination--is made to send, as he lies dying, to his mother:

‘Go, tell ye now my mother dear, my mother sore-afflicted, Ne’er to await me home again, ne’er to abide my coming; Yet tell her not that I am slain, tell her not I am fallen; Nay, tell her then that I am wed--wed in these wilds so weary. The black earth for my wife I took, the hard rock my bride’s mother, And all the little pebbles here I took for my new kindred[1373].’

The feeling displayed in these lines (which are credited by Passow to the town of Livadia (Λεβαδεία) in Boeotia) finds closely similar expression in a recently-published Macedonian folk-song. The latter however is not a mere copy of the former. Its metre is different, and further it is a folk-song of the romantic order, whereas the lines which I have quoted belong to an historical ballad. A youth is lowered by his brothers, so runs the story, into a well to get water for them, but the well proves to be haunted by a snake-like monster (στοιχειό[1374]) from whom they try in vain to rescue him. In this plight he cries to them:

‘Oh leave me, brothers, leave me, go ye on your way, And say not to my mother dear that I am dead, But tell her, brothers, tell her how that I am wed; The black earth for my wife I took, the tombstone my bride’s mother, And all these little blades of grass her brethren and her sisters[1375].’

Even more remarkable in its total absence of grief is a fragment given by Passow under the title of ‘the Wedding in Hades.’ The lamentation--for technically at least the poem falls into the class of ‘dirges’--is sung by a mother for her son, and she speaks of her own mother, who is already dead and in the nether world, as making preparation for the boy’s wedding in Hades.

‘My mother maketh glad to-day, she maketh my son’s wedding, She goeth for water to the springs, for snow unto the mountains, To fruit-wives in their garden-plots for apples and for quinces. “Ye springs,” she saith, “give water cool, and give me snow, ye mountains, Ye fruit-wives in your garden-plots, give apples and give quinces. For unto me a dear one comes down from the world above us; Not from a strange land cometh he, nor from among strange people, He is the child of mine own child, right dear and deep-beloved.”[1376]’

From these passages and from many others conceived in the same spirit it will readily be seen that the thought of death as a kind of marriage, however mystical it may seem to us, is familiar to the modern Greek peasants. Nor has that thought become crystallised into a set form of words to be repeated without heed or understanding of their meaning. The very variety of treatment given to the idea proves that we are not dealing with a mere traditional expression or unmeaning commonplace, but with a vital belief still capable of stirring the ballad-maker’s imagination. Further it is this thought which almost alone strikes a note of cheerfulness and of hope in the popular dirges. The usual picture of the lower world is nothing but gloom and despair. It is a place of darkness on which the sun never shines, a place of ice and snow, and full of cob-webs. There are no churches there with bright golden icons; no quoits for the young men to throw; no looms for the women to ply. Hunger is not appeased, thirst not quenched, and sleep is denied. All is mourning and regret for the warm stirring life of the upper world, and anxious fears for wife or children left behind. Happy those who are allowed even to taste of the river of death, and to forget their homes and orphaned little ones. Thus with strange medley of ancient and modern is the dirge-singer wont to describe that lower world to which all the dead without distinction go. Yet even into these dirges, which--in order to excite the mourners to wilder displays of grief--purposely emphasize the gloomiest aspects of death, there is allowed to enter the one cheering thought that the departed for whom lamentation is made is not dead nor yet fallen on eternal sleep, but wedded in a new world; and it is worthy of notice that it is with this thought that many of the dirges end, as if this one consolation and hope were designed to assuage the pangs of sorrow which the first part of the dirge had excited.

Thus a brief study of the modern Greek dirges reveals to us the curious fact that a mystic conception of death is widely prevalent among the simple-minded peasants of Greece, and that, with all their _naïveté_ in pourtraying the horrors of the lower world, it is from a recondite doctrine that they draw consolation. How came they to be the stewards of a doctrine so strange, so remote from the primitive simplicity of their ordinary life?

Once more we must look back to a pre-Christian antiquity, and seek again in Greek Tragedy the evidence of popular belief. Just as Aeschylus above all others has preserved to us the awful doctrine of future retribution for the deadly sin of blood-guilt, so from Sophocles we may learn the more comfortable doctrine that death, while it involves a parting from friends in this upper world, is also the means of drawing nearer, in an union as it were of wedlock, to the denizens of the lower world. The _locus classicus_ for this conception is the _Antigone_. Throughout the latter part of that play, when once the doom of Antigone has been pronounced, the thought of her death as a wedding, and of the rock-hewn tomb where she is to be immured as a bridal-chamber, finds repeated and emphatic expression.

Of course it may be said that Antigone was the promised bride of Haemon, and that the poet in speaking of her tomb as a bridal-chamber was seeking to accentuate the pathetic contrast between her hopes and her destiny. That is true; but perhaps it is not the whole truth; perhaps Sophocles rather utilised the evident pathos of the situation for the purpose of covert allusion to doctrines which were in themselves unspeakable, such as Herodotus would have passed over with the words εὔστομα κείσθω. For we must not forget that the majority of an Athenian audience, initiated as they naturally would be in the Eleusinian mysteries, were familiar with religious teachings of which none might make explicit mention in the pages of literature open to the profane, but at which a poet might well hint in words which beneath their superficial meaning hid a truth intelligible to such as had ears to hear. Aeschylus indeed had once ventured too far in his allusions to the mysteries[1377]; but there is no improbability, or rather there is on that account an increased probability, in the supposition that a discreet and veiled allusion to unspeakable doctrines was permitted to the Tragic poet. Let us turn to the actual passages of the _Antigone_.

The first suggestion of the thought comes ironically enough, though it is but a faint suggestion, from the lips of Creon, who to Ismene’s exclamation, “Wilt thou indeed bereave thine own son of her?” retorts “’Tis Hades’ part to arrest this wedding[1378].” The thought is taken up later by the Chorus, who, after their hymn in honour of unconquerable Love, revert to words of pity for the woman there before them, and tell how they can no longer check the founts of tears, when they behold Antigone drawing near to ‘the bed-chamber where all must sleep’ (τὸν παγκοίταν θάλαμον)[1379]. Here the expression of the idea is becoming plainer, and it is no accident that the word θάλαμος, so commonly used of the bride-chamber, is here selected. But yet clearer words are to follow; for Antigone herself, in response to these words of compassion from the Chorus, interprets more boldly that at which they hint. ‘Me doth Hades, with whom all must sleep, bear off yet alive to Acheron’s shore, me that have had no part in wedlock, whose name hath never rung forth in bridal hymn, but ’tis Acheron I shall wed[1380].’

Nor does this clear pronouncement stand alone; thrice more, as the play advances, the same thought is echoed in unmistakeable tones. First comes the opening of that half impassioned, half sophistic, speech of Antigone, from which some critics would delete her argumentative estimate of a brother’s claims as against those of a husband; but the removal of those lines would still leave intact that outburst, ‘Oh tomb, oh bride-chamber, oh cavernous abode of everlasting durance[1381].’ And then again in the speech of the messenger, who bears tidings of the fate of both Antigone and her lover, the same thought is pressed upon us with double insistence. First he tells how, having given Polynices his full rites of burial, they turned to go next ‘unto the vaulted chamber where on couch of rock the maiden should be wed with Hades’ (πρὸς λιθόστρωτον κόρης νυμφεῖον Ἅιδου κοῖλον), and from afar is heard the voice of loud lament beside ‘the bridal chamber unhallowed by funeral rites’ (ἀκτέριστον ἀμφὶ παστάδα[1382]). And later in the same narrative, when we have heard how that voice of loud lament was stilled, Haemon is pictured as lying dead in Antigone’s dead embrace, having won his bridal’s fulfilment only in Hades’ house (τὰ νυμφικὰ τέλη λαχὼν δείλαιος ἐν γ’ Ἅιδου δόμοις)[1383].

The reiteration of a single thought through all this series of passages is most remarkable. What does it mean? Did Sophocles intend merely to enhance the tragedy of Antigone’s doom by constant comparison of that which might have been with that which was? Or did each phrase in which the thoughts of marriage and of death were blended contain a further and a subtler appeal to his hearers’ emotions? Did each phrase strike also a note which set vibrating in his listeners’ hearts responsive chords of mystic hope?

For my part, as I draw near the end of these studies in Greek religion, I find it more and more difficult to set down as mere casual coincidences the close resemblances between Greece in the past and Greece in the present. I have found a belief in the supernatural beings of Ancient Greece still swaying the minds of the modern peasants; I have seen the customs of antiquity repeated alike in the small acts of every-day life and in the ceremonies of its greater events; I have heard the same thoughts expressed in almost the same turns of phrase as in ancient literature; I have traced the popular conceptions of the present day concerning the relations of body and soul, and their existence after death, back to native pre-Christian sources. Have I then not a right, am I not bound, to abjure coincidence and to claim for the past and the present real identity? When I find in Sophocles the same thought, almost the same words, which may be gathered to-day from the lips of any unlettered lament-maker the whole Greek world over, I am compelled by my conviction of the continuity of all things Greek to believe that Sophocles adapted to his own use a thought which in his time even as now was uttered in many a funeral-dirge, and that while the phrases of the _Antigone_ gained in his hands a new lustre from the pathos of their setting, they themselves were not new nor the invention of Sophocles’ genius, but an old heritage of the Greek race. Maybe it was that same thought which gave birth to the strange and but

## partially known legend of the death of Hymenaeus himself in the first

moment of his wedded delight[1384]; maybe it was in the same spirit that Prometheus foretold how Zeus himself should make such a marriage as should cast him down from his throne of tyranny and he be no more seen, in fulfilment of the curse uttered by Cronos when he was cast down into the unseen world[1385].

But, it may be said, the forebodings of Prometheus are generally taken to refer to a future marriage with Thetis, not with death; and Pindar’s reference to Hymenaeus is vague and fragmentary; and the lines of Sophocles’ _Antigone_ have plenty of human pathos, without reading into them any religious doctrine; let your contention at least have the support of sober prose which shows its meaning on the surface. So be it. Artemidorus in his hand-book to the interpretation of dreams claims as a recognised religious principle the correlation of marriage and death. To dream of the one is commonly a prognostication of the other. But let us hear his own words. “If an unmarried man dream of death, it foretells his marriage; for both alike, marriage and death, have universally been held by mankind to be ‘fulfilments’ (τέλη); and they are constantly indicated by one another; for the which reason also if sick men dream of marriage, it is a foreboding of death[1386].” And again: ‘if a sick person dream of sexual intercourse with a god or goddess ..., it is a sign of death; for it is then, when the soul is near leaving the body which it inhabits, that it foresees union and intercourse with the gods[1387].’ And yet once more: ‘since indeed marriage is akin to death and is indicated by dreaming of death, I thought it well to touch upon it here. If a sick man dreams of marrying a maiden, it is a sign of his death; for all the accompaniments of marriage are exactly the same as those of death[1388].’ The gist of these passages is unmistakeable; in clear and straightforward terms is enunciated the principle that death and marriage are so intimately associated that to dream of the one may portend the happening of the other. Here is the doctrine which we sought to elicit from the poetry of Sophocles and from the dirges of modern peasants, stated in plain prosaic language. Death is akin to marriage, and, as death approaches, men’s souls foresee a wedded union with gods.

But Artemidorus does not merely vouch for the existence of this mystic doctrine; he suggests also, to those who will weigh his words, that the doctrine was generally recognised and widely-spread: ‘for all the accompaniments of marriage,’ he says, ‘are exactly the same as those of death.’ What were these accompaniments? Seemingly Artemidorus had in mind certain customs which he had enumerated a little earlier, namely ‘an escort of friends, both men and women, and garlands and scents and unguents and an inventory of goods[1389]’ (i.e. either the marriage settlement or the last will and testament). It is then owing to this similarity between marriage-customs and funeral-customs that ‘if a sick man dreams of marrying a maiden, it is a sign of death.’ But previously we heard that if a sick person dreamt of commerce with a god or goddess, it was a sign of death, because, as death approached, the soul foresaw union and intercourse with the gods. How far do these statements agree? In both cases the interpretation of the dream is the same--to dream of marriage forebodes death--while the reasons for that interpretation are differently given according as the partner in the dreamt-of union is divine or human. But, though differently given, these reasons are not mutually inconsistent. In the one case the reason assigned is an idea--the idea that by death men were admitted to wedded union with their gods. In the other case the reason assigned is a custom--the custom of giving to the dead rites similar to the marriage-rites. In effect then the two reasons assigned are one and the same in spirit; for the ‘custom’ is merely the practical expression of the ‘idea’; it was because men believed that the dead attained to a wedded union with their gods, that they made the funeral-rites resemble the rites of marriage. And clearly this custom of assimilating the accompaniments of death to those of marriage could never have been general, as Artemidorus suggests, unless the belief, on which that custom was founded, had also been generally received and widely spread.

It will be worth while then to institute an enquiry into the customs generally observed both in ancient and modern times at weddings and at funerals. Our comparison of ancient literature with modern folk-songs, illumined by the statements of Artemidorus, has established the fact that death and marriage were very intimately associated in thought by some of the ancient writers as they are by many of the modern peasants. Custom will be found to tell the same tale, and will prove how generally accepted was this idea. For in point after point which Artemidorus does not mention in his brief enumeration--and without reckoning, as he does, such purely business matters as the inventory of goods--we shall find that the ceremonies incidental to a funeral have now, and had in old time, a curiously close resemblance to the ceremonies incidental to marriage; and, so finding, we may be confident that they were informed by a general and wide-spread belief that to die was but to marry into Hades’ house. Let us review them briefly and in order[1390].

The first ceremony in both functions alike was, and is, a solemn ablution. Before a Greek wedding both bride and bridegroom have always been required to bathe themselves, usually in water specially fetched from some holy spring. At Athens in old time, according to Thucydides, the spring frequented for this purpose was Callirrhoë[1391]; and similarly the Thebans had resort to the Ismenus[1392], the maidens of the Troad to the Scamander[1393], and the inhabitants of other districts to some spring or river of local repute[1394]. And at the present day in Athens it is still from Callirrhoë (when there is any water there) that the poorer classes fill the bridal bath; while many a village has its own sacred well or fountain (ἅγι̯ασμα) to which recourse is regularly had for this same purpose. And this wedding-ablution, common, as it would thus appear, to the Greeks of all ages, has its counterpart in the funeral-ablution, a ceremony likewise observed in all ages. Thus Sophocles makes Antigone speak of having washed with her own hands the dead bodies of father, mother, and brother[1395]; and Lucian in a mocking tone refers to the same practice as general in his day[1396]. At the present day the same rite is practically universal in Greece. In some places, and most notably in Crete, special magnificence is given to the ceremony by the use of warm wine instead of water; in others, as Macedonia[1397], the custom has dwindled away, and all that remains of it is a perfunctory moistening of the dead man’s face with a piece of cotton-wool soaked in wine. But in general the old custom remains unchanged. Thus we see that from ancient times down to the present day a ceremony of ablution has held a place in the preliminaries alike of a marriage and of a funeral.

Again in this matter of washing there is one detail of special interest. The water for the bridal bath was in old times fetched by a boy or girl[1398] closely related to the bride or the bridegroom, and the λουτροφόρος, as the bearer was called, is still an important figure in the wedding ceremonial of the present day. Nowadays, so far as I know, the bearer is always a boy, and further it is essential that both his parents be still living. The λουτροφόρος therefore has always been closely associated with the marriage-rite. But in antiquity the same water-bearer appears in another connexion. ‘It was customary,’ we hear, ‘to fetch water (λουτροφορεῖν) also for those who died unmarried, and that the figure of a water-bearer (λουτροφόρον) should be set up over their tomb. The figure was that of a boy with a pitcher[1399].’ Here we have a clear case of the importation of a ceremony closely connected with marriage into the funeral-rites of the unmarried. How are we to explain this custom? On what religious conception was it based? Clearly, it seems,--in view of that constant association of death and marriage which we have observed in ancient literature and modern folk-song--no other interpretation can well be maintained than that, for those who died unwed, death itself was the first and only marriage which they experienced, and that to such, ere they were laid in Hades’ nuptial-chamber, there ought to be given those same rites which were held to be a fitting preparation for entrance into the estate of wedlock in this world[1400].

The ceremonial ablutions being concluded, there came next the rites of anointing and arraying whether for marriage or for burial. As regards the cosmetics, we might feel well assured, even without the direct testimony of Aristophanes[1401], that they were freely used in ancient weddings; and I myself have experienced a sense of suffocation from the same cause at weddings in modern Greece. Similarly at ancient funerals the original purpose of the _lecythi_ was without doubt to contain the choice perfumes for the anointing of the dead[1402]; and the custom of anointing is still well known. Then again in the matter of dress, the colour usually considered correct[1403] both for marriage and for burial was white, and, even if this cannot be said to have been universally the case, at any rate there was, and there still continues to be, no less pomp and ornament in the dress of the dead body[1404] than in the array of bride and bridegroom.

In this connexion too we may notice the use of the actual bridal-dress in the funerals of betrothed girls and of young wives. That this practice was known in antiquity is proved by a passage of Chariton[1405], in which the heroine of his story, Callirrhoë, whose first adventure, soon after her wedding, consists in being carried out to burial while unconscious but not dead, is described as ‘dressed in bridal array’; and exactly the same custom may be witnessed in Greece to-day[1406]. In fact not only may the person of the dead be seen dressed as for a wedding, but in the folk-songs we hear of the tomb itself being adorned like the home to which the bride should have been led.

‘Came her lover to her bedside, stooped him down, and met her kiss; Low and faint to his ear only, whispered she, her message this: “When I pass away, my lover, deck thou out my tomb for me, As thou would’st have decked the home where wedded I should dwell with thee[1407].”’

Yet another point of coincidence between the ceremonial of marriage and of funeral is the wearing of a crown. In ancient times ‘chaplets,’ says Becker[1408], ‘were certainly worn both by bride and bridegroom,’ and in modern usage they are as essential to the marriage ceremony as the wedding-rings. At a certain point in the service, it is the duty of the best man, assisted by the chief bridesmaid, to keep exchanging the rings from the hands of the bride and bridegroom, and in like manner to exchange the crowns which they wear from the head of one to the head of the other; and as the rings are always worn afterwards, so the two crowns are carefully preserved and hung up together in the new home. Equally well-established is the use of garlands in ancient funerals[1409], and, if not quite universal at the present day[1410], they are at any rate commonly employed in the funerals of women and children. In Macedonia it is actually the bridal crown which is worn for burial by anyone who was betrothed or newly married[1411].

Worthy of notice too is the not uncommon spectacle of an apple, quince[1412], or pomegranate laid among the flowers with which the bier is adorned; for all these three fruits have their special significance in relation to marriage. The classical custom of throwing an apple into a girl’s lap as a sign of love is a method of wooing still known to the rustic swain. It is not indeed regarded as a highly respectable method, but perhaps neither in old times was it so; for then, as now, the more well-conducted youths seem to have had their wooing, if such it may be called, carried on through the agency of an elderly lady (in ancient Greek προμνήστρια, in modern προξενήτρια) whose negotiations were chiefly addressed to the parents on either side, and whose conversation smacked more of dowry than of love. The quince and the pomegranate however are employed without any offence to propriety. The former is in some districts the food of which the newly-married pair are required to partake together at their first entry into their new home; and it is hoped that the sweetness of the fruit will so temper their lips that nothing but sweet words will ever be addressed by the one to the other. To the open-minded observer it might appear that acidity rather than sweetness was the chief characteristic of the quince, and that, if the qualities of the fruit are found to affect the tones of those who eat it, they would be better advised, as is the custom in some villages, to substitute for the quince a well-sugared cake or a dish of honey. But the pomegranate is far more commonly used than the quince, and in a variety of ways. Sometimes the bride and bridegroom eat together of it; elsewhere the bridegroom proffers it to the bride as his first gift on her entrance to their home, and she alone eats of it; or again she may be required to hurl it down and scatter its seeds over the floor. The second of these methods of using the pomegranate at marriage is, it will be remembered, of venerable antiquity; it was a seed of this fruit which Hades gave to Persephone to eat, that when she visited again the upper world she might not remain there all her days with reverend, dark-robed Demeter, but return to her home in the nether world[1413]; and similarly at the Argive Heraeum, the bride of Zeus was represented by Polyclitus holding in one of her hands the fruit of the pomegranate, concerning which, says Pausanias, there is a mystic story not to be divulged[1414]. Here again then is found the same close association of death and marriage. The three fruits, apple, quince, and pomegranate, each of which possesses a special use and purport in the preliminaries or the actual ceremony of marriage, are also the fruits most commonly laid upon the bier, in token, as it must appear, that death is but a marriage into the unseen world. In the light of such customs we can read with fuller understanding that simple and yet mystic dirge, ‘The Wedding in Hades’:

‘My mother maketh glad to-day, she maketh my son’s wedding, She goeth for water to the springs, for snow unto the mountains, To fruit-wives in their garden-plots for apples and for quinces...[1415].’

Thus in point after point the rites of marriage and the rites of death among Greeks both past and present have been found to coincide; and the number of these points of coincidence is too large to admit of their being referred to accident; design is evident. We are bound to suppose either that marriage-ceremonies were deliberately transferred to the funeral-rite, or that funeral-ceremonies were deliberately transferred to the marriage-rite. Which supposition shall we prefer? There can be no real question. It is impossible to conceive of a people so cynical or so distempered as to darken the wedding-day with grim reminders of death. But to transfer some of the usages of marriage to the funeral-scene was to infuse one ray of hope where all else was sorrow and darkness, to teach that, though the dead and the mourners might grieve for their parting, yet by that parting from the old home the dead was to enter upon a new life, a life of wedded happiness, in the unseen world. For indeed if there were no such intention as this, what was the meaning of the λουτροφόρος set up over the grave of the unmarried, what the purpose of adorning the dead with wedding-garment and wedding-crown? These two acts at least are no accidents; they reveal a studied purpose of assimilating the usages of death to the usages of marriage; and if that purpose underlay two of the customs enumerated, there is good warrant for the belief that in all the coincidences between marriage-rites and funeral-rites the same thought was operating--that very thought which has been found to be the common property of the Greek race, from one of the masters of ancient tragedy down to the humblest peasant of our day. Custom past and present, ancient literature, modern folk-song, all agree in their presentment of death as a marriage into the house of Hades.

On this popular and withal recondite conception of death were founded, I believe, the highest religious aspirations of the ancient Greeks. Such as had served their gods piously and purely in this life might hope to win a closer union, as of wedlock, with those gods in the life hereafter. To them there could be neither blasphemy nor presumption in their hope; for to pious believers the fabled experience of their own ancestors in this life was a warrant for aspiring themselves to the same bliss at least hereafter; what had been, might be again. Nay, more; not only was the belief that the highest bliss of the hereafter consisted in the marriage of men with their gods free from all reproach of impiety, but it was the logical development of two religious sentiments which we have already reviewed--the desire for close communion between gods and men, and the belief that men after death and dissolution would still enjoy, like their gods, corporeal existence. A previous chapter has been devoted to a detailed examination of the means whereby men in their daily life sought to maintain communication with the powers above them--oracles from which all might enquire and win inspired response; interpretation of the flight and cries of birds that were the messengers of heaven; reading of the signs written by the finger of some god on the flesh of the victim presented to him; divination from sight and sound and dream; sacrifice whereby some message of prayer might be sent with speed and safety to the god who had power to fulfil it. And in general it will, I think, be admitted that the main tendency of Greek religious thought was to draw gods and men nearer together, alike by an anthropomorphic conception of the gods and by an apotheosis of human beauty; that it was to subserve this end that Art became the handmaid of Religion, and strove to express the divine in terms of the human, to discover in man the potentialities of godhead. All religious hope and ambition and effort turned upon communion with the gods. How then in the next world should hope be fulfilled, ambition satisfied, effort rewarded? What should be the glorious consummation? Marriage was the closest communion between mortals in this world; marriage, so sang the poets, bound gods together in closest communion. Men’s aspirations for communion with their gods could find no final satisfaction save in marriage. To the few, we may suppose--men of refined and reflective mind, capable of imagining spiritual joys--this marriage of men and gods was but a mystic, figurative expression for the union of man’s soul with the soul of God, a thought as chastened and innocent of all sensuous connotation as the thought of many a woman who in a later era, withdrawn from the world, has comforted her loneliness with the hope of being the bride of Christ. But the many, I suspect, flinched not before a bold and literal interpretation of the thought, and, believing that, when death and physical dissolution were past, body as well as soul survived in another world, dared dream that having passed the gates of mortality into the demesne of the immortals they should be wedded, body and soul, in true wedlock with those deities who by veiled communion with them in this world had prepared them for sight and touch and full fruition hereafter.

But, it will be asked, where in all Greek literature can we find a statement, where even a hint, of this strange doctrine? Nowhere a statement; often a hint; for these were things not to be divulged to the profane. To those alone who were initiated into the Mysteries was the doctrine revealed, and even to them, it may be, in parables only whose inner meaning each must probe for himself.

There have of course been those who have made light of the mysteries of the old Greek religion, and have seen in them nothing but the impositions of a close hierarchy playing upon the ignorance and credulity and fear of the common-folk. But when we consider the veneration in which the more famous mysteries were held for many centuries, when we remember that Eleusis was respected and left inviolate not only by the Lacedaemonians and other Greek peoples when they invaded Attic territory, but even by the Persians who had dared to devastate the Acropolis, and in later times by the yet ruder Celts, then it is easier to believe that we are dealing with a great religious institution based upon solid principles and vital doctrines which deserved a wide-spread and long-continued reverence from mankind, than that it was all the elaborate and empty hoax of a crafty priesthood.

Nor again does the view which makes Demeter simply a corn-goddess and the Eleusinian mysteries a portentous harvest-thanksgiving--and that apparently somewhat premature--require any long or serious consideration. Corn indeed was one of the blessings given by Demeter to this upper world of living men; perhaps in the very earliest ages of her worship this was the sum total of the boons which men sought of her; doubtless even in her fully-developed mysteries a part of men’s thanks were still for the garnered harvest of the last year and for the promise which the green fields gave of her bounty once more to be renewed; for even in the nineteenth century of the Christian era her statue amid the ruins of Eleusis was still associated by the peasants with agriculture, and the removal of it, they apprehended, would cause a failure of the crops[1416]. But in old time this was not all. To speak of Demeter as a mere personification of cereals is to advocate a partial truth little better than the cynical falsehood which makes her only the stalking-horse of designing priests. For what said men of light and learning among the ancients[1417], men who knew the whole truth and the whole Spirit of her worship? ‘Thrice happy they of men that have looked upon these rites ere they go to Hades’ house; for they alone there have true life, the rest have nought there but ill[1418].’ So Sophocles, in language clearly recalling that of the so-called Homeric hymn[1419] to Demeter; and in harmony with him Pindar: ‘Happy he that hath seen those rites ere he go beneath the earth; he knoweth life’s consummation, he knoweth its god-given source[1420].’ And surely such consummation of life should be in that paradise, where ‘mid meadows red with roses lieth the space before the city’s gates, all hazy with frankincense and laden with golden fruits,’ where ‘the glorious sun sheds his light while night is here[1421]’; for to this belief even Aristophanes subscribes, neither daring nor wishing to make mock of the blessed ones who in the other world have part in the god-beloved festival, and wend their way with song and dance through the holy circle of the goddess, a lawn bright with flowers, meadows where roses richly blossom--on whom alone in their night-long worship the sun yet shines and a gracious light, for that they have learnt the mysteries and dealt righteously with all men[1422].

Here then are the three great masters of lyric poetry, of tragedy, and of comedy in substantial agreement; and the hopes which they hold out are not the mere exuberance of poetic fancy, for sober prose affirms the same beliefs. What says Isocrates? ‘Demeter ... being graciously minded towards our forefathers because of their services to her, services of which none but the initiated may hear, gave us the greatest of all gifts, first, those fruits of the earth which saved us from living the life of beasts, and secondly, that rite which makes happier the hopes of those that participate therein concerning both the end of life and their whole existence; and our city proved herself not only god-beloved but also loving toward mankind, in that, having become mistress of such blessings, she grudged them not to the rest of the world, but gave to all men a share in that she had received[1423].’ Of this passage Lobeck[1424] was disposed to make light, and that for the reason that Isocrates in another passage[1425], with less orthodoxy perhaps and more charity, in speaking of the pious and upright in general, employs part of the same phrase which in the passage before us he applies to the initiated only. All good men, he says, have happier hopes ‘concerning their whole existence’; virtue, that is, may expect a reward, vice a punishment, either here or hereafter. Are these fair grounds on which to condemn his reference to the mysteries as a meaningless common-place? If any comment is to be made upon this repetition of a well-known phrase, would it not be fairer to note that in reference to the mysteries he speaks of men’s happier hopes not only generally--‘concerning their whole existence’ (περὶ τοῦ σύμπαντος αἰῶνος) but also specifically--‘concerning the end of life’ (περὶ τῆς τοῦ βίου τελευτῆς), and thus echoes the words of Pindar above quoted, ‘he knoweth the consummation of life’ (οἶδεν μὲν βιότου τελευτάν)? Nor is there any dearth of other authorities to prove that it was after death that the hopes of the initiated should ‘be emptied in delight.’ Let us hear Aristides. ‘Nay, but the benefit of the (Eleusinian) festival is not merely the cheerfulness of the moment and the freedom and respite from all previous troubles, but also the possession of happier hopes concerning the end, hopes that our life hereafter will be the better, and that we shall not lie in darkness and in filth--the fate that is believed to await the uninitiated[1426].’ Such seem to have been the general terms in which the benefits of the mysteries might be recommended to the profane. The same ideas, almost the same phrases, occur again and again. Witness the well-known story of Diogenes the Cynic, who, when urged by a young man to get himself initiated, answered, ‘It is strange, my young friend, if you fancy that by virtue of this rite the publicans will share with the gods the good things of Hades’ house, while Agesilaus and Epaminondas lie in filth[1427].’ Or again let us read the advice of Crinagoras to his friend: ‘Set thy foot on Cecropian soil, that thou may’st behold those nights of Demeter’s great mysteries, which shall free thee from care among the living, and, when thou goest where most are gone, shall make thy heart lighter[1428].’ And with equal seriousness Cicero, who in his ideal state would forbid all nocturnal rites as tending towards excesses, would except the Eleusinian mysteries, not only because of their humanising and cheering influence upon men’s life in this world but also because they furnish better hopes in death[1429].

Such are the most important passages bearing upon the religious as opposed to the temporal and agricultural aspects of Demeter’s worship, such the general terms in which the blessings flowing therefrom were overtly described by men who knew the details of the covert doctrine. The information contained in them amounts to this: the initiated received in the mysteries a hope, a pledge, perhaps a foretaste, of the future bliss reserved for them only; the profane should lie in filth and outer darkness; the blessed should dwell in pleasant meadows, and the sun should shine bright upon them; they should be god-beloved, and should share with the gods the good things of the next world.

Now obviously these vague and general promises are conceived in the tone and the spirit of that popular religion which had sprung from the very heart of the Hellenic folk. The pleasant meadows where the initiated should dwell are none other than that place which appears once as the asphodel mead, anon as the islands of the blessed or as part of the under-world, and is now named Paradise. The light which illumines even the night-time of the blessed is the necessary contrast to the murky gloom of a nether abode, conceived almost in the spirit of Homer, where the profane must lie as in a slough. And finally the close communion of the blessed with gods who love them is the consummation of those hopes which the whole Hellenic people entertained, and of those efforts which the whole Hellenic people put forth, to attain to close intercourse in this life with the gods whom they worshipped. Clearly then the general promises, whose inner mysteries were revealed only to the initiated, were based upon the old ideals, the innate beliefs, the traditional hopes, in a word, the natural and spontaneous religion of the Hellenic race.

And, as at Eleusis, so probably in other mysteries. In a famous passage Theo Smyrnaeus[1430] compares the successive steps to be taken in the study of philosophy with the several stages of initiation in mysteries, and Lobeck[1431] in his examination of the passage has shown that the reference is not to the mysteries of Eleusis, or at any rate not to them only. It is probable enough that Theo was speaking of mysteries in general, both public and private, in most of which there were, doubtless, several grades of initiation, and he may even have selected the details of his illustration (for it is an analogy only, not an argument, in which he is engaged) from different rites. Yet for his fifth and final stage of initiation, beyond even ‘open vision’ (ἐποπτεία) and ‘exposition’ (δᾳδουχία or ἰεροφαντία), he names that bliss which is the outcome of the earlier stages, the bliss of being god-beloved and sharing the life of gods (ἡ κατὰ τὸ θεοφιλὲς καὶ θεοῖς συνδιαιτὸν εὐδαιμονία).

The recurrence of the word θεοφιλής in the above passages, whether in reference to the Eleusinian or to other mysteries, cannot but excite attention; and we shall not I think go far astray if we take the last phrase of Theo Smyrnaeus, ‘the bliss of being god-beloved and sharing the life of gods,’ as an epitome of the somewhat vague and general promises held out to the profane as an inducement to initiation. This was the fulfilment of those ‘happier hopes’--to use another recurrent phrase--of which the initiated might only speak in guarded fashion. The exact interpretation of this phrase, as we shall have reason to believe when we consider the separate rites in detail, was the great mystic secret. But of that more anon; for the present let us suppose that the general assurances openly given concerning both the Eleusinian and other mysteries are fairly summed up in the promise ‘of being god-beloved and of sharing the life of gods.’ Such a promise appealed to those innate hopes of the whole Greek race which manifested themselves in their constant striving after close intercourse and communion with their gods; in other words, the happier hopes concerning the hereafter, which the mysteries sought to appropriate and to reserve to the initiated alone, had for their basis the natural religion of the Hellenic folk.

To admit this is necessarily to admit the validity of Lobeck’s refutation of those critics who have sought to father on the mysteries, usually on those of Eleusis, doctrines and ideas foreign to, or even incompatible with, popular Greek religion--pantheism, the emanation of the human soul from the soul of God, the transmigration of souls, the Platonic theory of ideas, the unity of God omnipotent and omniscient[1432], and such-like religious products of different ages and different climes. For if we were to accept the view that the teaching of the mysteries was a thing apart from the ordinary trend and tenor of the popular religion, then we should be compelled to regard those general promises of future bliss (which were in truth, as we have just seen, based upon popular religion) as a fraudulent bait designed to entice men away from their old beliefs and to ensnare them in dogma and priestcraft; and if any would impute fraud, there awaits them the task of convicting Pindar, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Isocrates, and others who wrote of that which they knew, of conspiracy to deceive.

But while the promises held forth by the Eleusinian and other mysteries, and therefore also the doctrines which elucidated those vague promises, were a product of the popular religion, those doctrines themselves were not a matter of popular knowledge. The very fact of initiation, the death-penalty inflicted upon the profane who by any means penetrated to the scene of the mysteries, the wild indignation excited in Athens by a charge of mocking the mystic rites, the scrupulous privacy observed in investigating that charge before a court composed of the initiated only--all these are proofs that Eleusis was the school of secret beliefs and hopes held in deep veneration by those to whom the knowledge of them was vouchsafed. Secret doctrines existed; that which had sprung from the beliefs of the many had become the property of the few. How can this be explained?

The explanation is not difficult. The worship of Demeter and possibly many other rites which were afterwards called ‘mysteries’ were the most holy part of the religion of the Pelasgians; and when the Achaeans, a people of strange tongue and strange religion, came among them, the Pelasgians would not admit them to a knowledge of their rites but thenceforth performed those rites in secrecy. This is proved by two facts. First, the rites which at Eleusis, in Samothrace, and among the Cicones in Thrace, the country of Orpheus, were imparted as mysteries to the initiated only, were in Crete open to all and there was no obligation to secrecy concerning them[1433]. Secondly, at Eleusis at any rate the purity required of candidates for initiation was not only physical and spiritual, as secured by ablution and abstinence, but also linguistic; it was necessary καθαρεύειν τῇ φωνῇ[1434], to speak the Greek language purely. These two facts taken together solve the difficulty. Before the coming of the Achaeans the whole Pelasgian population whether of the Greek mainland or of such an island as Crete celebrated the rites of Demeter openly. In Crete, where no Achaeans penetrated, the old custom naturally continued unchanged. On the mainland the influx of a people of strange tongue and strange religion necessitated secrecy in the native rites, lest the presence of men who knew not Demeter should profane her worship; the right of entry therefore at her festivals was decided by the simplest test of Achaean or Pelasgian nationality, the test of speech; and in later times, when the Achaeans had acquired the Pelasgian speech[1435], the customs thus established were not abolished; the rites of Demeter remained ‘mysteries’ to be conducted in secret, and the Shibboleth was still exacted.

Since then we may not seek in the teachings of the mysteries anything alien from the spirit of the popular religion, the scope of our enquiry is more limited and its course more clear. The secret to be discovered is something which had been evolved from the popular religion, some intensification and higher development of those hopes and beliefs, yearnings and strivings, which have continuously marked the religious life of the Greek folk. Now the mass of the Greek people have always hoped and believed, as their care for the dead has constantly shown, that beyond death and dissolution lay a life in which body and soul should be re-united and restored to their old activity; the mysteries might well confirm the initiated in that expectation and picture to them the happy habitations where they should dwell. Again the mass of the Greek people have always yearned and striven by manifold means in this life for close communion with their gods; the mysteries might well be a sacrament which afforded to the initiated both a means and a pledge of enjoying in the next world, to which body as well as soul should pass, the closest of all communion with their gods, the union of wedlock.

Let it then be supposed that the two main ideas of the mysteries, whether expounded in speech or represented in ritual, were these--bodily survival after death, and marriage of men with gods; what would have been the natural attitude of Christians towards these doctrines? For it is in the light of the charges brought by early Christian writers against the mysteries that such a supposition must first be examined. The doctrine of the immortality of the body as well as of the soul was evidently little exposed to Christian attacks; and it may have been because the Christian doctrine of the resurrection had much in common with the old Greek doctrine, that St Paul found among his audience on the Areopagus some who did not mock, but said ‘We will hear thee again of this matter.’ But with the further doctrine of marriage between men and gods Christianity could have no sympathy, but would inevitably regard it as offensive both in theology and in morality, as implying the existence of a plurality of gods, and as savouring of that sensuality, which above all other sin the apostle to the Gentiles set himself to combat.

And it is in fact upon these two points that the mass of the accusations brought by early Christian writers against Greek paganism hinge and hang. These were the points at which Greek religion seemed to its assailants most readily vulnerable, and against which they sought to use as weapons the very language of paganism itself. Just as Clement of Alexandria[1436] seeks to prove out of the mouth of Homer, who speaks of the gods in general as δαίμονες[1437], that the Greek gods are confessedly mere _demons_ (for the word δαίμων had seemingly deteriorated in meaning), that is to say, abominable and unclean spirits, enemies of the one true God, so too the words ἄρρητος and ἀπόρρητος, used by the pagans of their ‘unspeakable’ mysteries, were misinterpreted by the Christians with one consent and became a handle for convicting the old religion of ‘unnameable’ impurities.

With the question of polytheism however we are not further concerned; whether the Hellenic gods were true gods, as their worshippers held, or devils, as Clement thought, or non-existent, as many will think to-day, matters not; all that we need to know in this respect is known, namely, that the mysteries, like the popular religion, acknowledged a plurality of gods; for in the Eleusinian drama alone several gods played a part. It is rather the frequent and violent charges of impurity which call for investigation.

A few examples will suffice for the present. A comprehensive denunciation is that of Eusebius, who charges the pagans with celebrating, ‘in chant and hymn and story and in the unnameable rites of the mysteries, adulteries and yet baser lusts, and incestuous unions of mother with son, brother with sister[1438].’ And again he says, ‘In every city rites and mysteries of gods are taught, in harmony with the mythical stories of old time, so that even now in these rites, as well as in hymns and odes to the gods, men can hear of marriages of the gods, and of their procreation of children, and of dirges for death, and of drunken excesses, and of wanderings, and of passionate love or anger[1439].’ Equally outspoken is Clement of Alexandria in his ‘Exhortation to the heathen.’ Some specific statements in that work concerning the mysteries of several gods, though they support the general charges of impurity, may be postponed for later examination. It will be enough here to adduce the phrases in which, after denouncing those who, whether in the mysteries of the temples or the paintings with which their own houses were adorned, loved to look upon the lusts of gods (he risks even the word πασχητιασμοί), and ‘regarded incontinence as piety,’ Clement reaches the climax of his invective:--‘Such are your models of voluptuousness, such your creeds of lust, such the doctrines of gods who commit fornication with you; for, as the Athenian orator says, what a man wishes, that he also believes[1440].’ This brutal directness of Clement is however hardly more effective than the elegant innuendo of Synesius in dealing with the same subject. Commenting on the secrecy of the nocturnal rites, he describes them as celebrated at ‘times and places competent to conceal ἀρρητουργίαν ἔνθεον[1441]’--a phrase which I despair of rendering, for the ‘unspeakable acts’ to which ‘divine frenzy’ led, are those which are either too holy or too infamous to be named.

These few typical passages amply demonstrate that alike by insinuation and by open accusation the Christian writers conspired to brand the mysteries with the infamy of deeds unnameable. What is the explanation of this organised campaign of calumny?

Some have supposed that the Christian writers in general confused the public and the private mysteries, and that, aware of the license which characterized the latter, they included all in one condemnation. But this explanation appears at any rate inadequate. We have seen how Cicero distinguished sharply between the Eleusinian mysteries, in which he had participated and for which he felt reverence, and other nocturnal rites which gave shelter to all manner of excess. It is difficult therefore to suppose that in later times the Christian writers should all have fallen unwittingly into the error of confusing all mysteries together; and no less difficult to imagine that, if they recognised how far removed were the most respected of the public mysteries from the baser private orgies, they should have deliberately exposed themselves to the charge of ignorance of the subject concerning which they presumed to preach. Clement of Alexandria was too shrewd a disputant so to stultify himself.

Nor again is it a sufficient explanation to say that the strain and excitement of such mysteries as those of Eleusis were responsible for a certain amount of subsequent indiscretion. Let it be granted that many of those who had witnessed the solemn rites were guilty afterwards of drunkenness and licentiousness[1442]; yet these would be no grounds for convicting the mysteries themselves of impurity; to so perverted a charge the heathen might well have answered that rioting and drunkenness had not been unknown at the Christians’ most solemn service; and indeed the same argument could up to this day be used against the Greek celebration of Easter. No; the charges of impurity were brought against the mysteries themselves, not against the incidental misdoings of some who had witnessed them. It must have been either the doctrines taught or the dramatic representations by means of which they were taught that furnished the Christian writers with a handle for accusation.

Now if, as I have supposed, the doctrine of the marriage of men with their gods was the cardinal doctrine of the mysteries (for the other doctrine of bodily survival is merely preliminary and subordinate to this), and if some dramatic representation was given as a means of instilling into men’s minds the hope of attaining to that summit of bliss, it is not difficult to see what an opening the mysteries gave to their opponents for the charges which were actually brought. The ultimate bliss promised to the initiated was in general terms said to consist in ‘being god-beloved and dwelling with the gods,’ and this phrase, we are supposing, signified to the initiated themselves an assurance that their gods would admit them even to wedlock with them in the future life. It required then no great ingenuity in the way of misrepresentation for Clement, if he had but an inkling of the secret doctrine, to denounce the heathen and their beliefs in that opprobrious phrase, ‘Such are the doctrines of gods that commit fornication with you.’ This champion of Christianity knew no chivalry, gave no quarter, disdained no weapon, held no method of attack too base or insidious, if only he could wound and crush his heathen foes. It was his part to pervert, to degrade, to blaspheme their whole religion; and that which they held most sacred was marked out for his most virulent scorn. Naturally to those who drew near with pure and reverent minds the mysteries wore a very different aspect. That which Clement misnamed lust, they felt to be love; where he saw only degradation, they recognised a wonderful condescension of their gods. For in the words of that religion which Clement preached ‘to the pure all things are pure’; and it was purification which the initiated sought by abstinence and ablution during the first part of the Eleusinian festival before they were admitted to their holy of holies.

Indeed if we would understand at all the spirit in which the ancient Greeks approached the celebration of the mysteries, we should do well to turn our attention for a little to the modern Greek celebration of Holy Week and Easter; for this is, so to speak, the Christian counterpart of the old mysteries, and seems to owe much to them. It so happens that Easter falls in the same period of the year as did the great Eleusinian festival--the period when the re-awakening of the earth from its winter sleep suggests to man his own re-awakening from the sleep of death; and it is probable that the Church turned this coincidence in time to good account by making her own festival a substitute for the festival of Demeter or other kindred rites, and even by modelling her own services after the pagan pattern; for it would seem that the Church, when once her early struggles had secured her a firm position, exchanged hostility for conciliation, and sought to absorb rather than to oust paganism. Her complaisance is clearly seen in the ceremonies of Good Friday and Easter; for, with all her severe repression of the use of idols (whose place however is well supplied by the pictures which are called icons), she has permitted the use of a sculptured figure at this one festival, and even down to this day Christ is represented in some localities[1443] in effigy; and it can hardly be doubted that the purpose of this concession was to make the Christian festival as dramatic and attractive as the pagan mysteries celebrated at the same season. Again the absorption of pagan ideas is well illustrated by the belief still prevalent among the peasants that the Easter festival, like the cult of Demeter, has an important bearing upon the growth of the crops. A story in point was told to me by one who had travelled in Greece[1444]. Happening to be in some village of Eubœa during Holy Week, he had been struck by the emotion which the Good Friday services evoked; and observing on the next day the same general air of gloom and despondency, he questioned an old woman about it; whereupon she replied, ‘Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year.’

In other details too there is a close correspondence between the pagan and the Christian festivals. As a period of abstinence was required of the _mystae_, so during Lent and still more strictly during Holy Week the Greek peasants keep a fast which certainly predisposes them to hysterical emotion during the services; and _en revanche_, just as the initiated are said to have indulged themselves too freely when the mysteries were over, so the modern peasants, when the announcement of the Resurrection has been made, disperse in haste to feast upon their Easter lamb, and while it is still a-cooking experience the inevitable effects of plentiful wine on an empty stomach. Again, just as the rites of Eleusis were nocturnal, so the chief services of Holy Week are those of the Friday night and the Saturday night; and it may be that the torch-light processions which close the services on those two nights are related to the δᾳδουχία of Eleusis. But these are minor details; it is in the actual services of Good Friday and Easter that the most striking resemblance to the Eleusinian mysteries is found, and the spirit in which the worshippers approach may still be the same now as then. Let me briefly describe the festival as I saw it in the island of Santorini, or, to give it the old name which has revived in modern times, Thera.

The Lenten fast was drawing to a close when I arrived. For the first week it is strictly observed, meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, and even olive-oil being prohibited, so that the ordinary diet is reduced to bread and water, to which is sometimes added a nauseous soup made from dried cuttle-fish or octopus; for these along with shellfish are not reckoned to be animal food, as being bloodless. During the next four weeks some relaxation is allowed; but no one with any pretensions to piety would even then partake of fish, meat, or eggs; the last-mentioned are stored up until Easter and then, being dyed red, are either eaten or--more wisely--offered to visitors. Then comes ‘the Great Week’ (ἡ μεγάλη ἑβδομάδα), and with it the same strict regulations come into force as during the first week of Lent. It was not hard to perceive that for most of the villagers the fast had been a real and painful abstinence. Work had almost ceased; for there was little energy left. Leisure was not enjoyed; for there was little spirit even for chatting. Everywhere white, sharp-featured faces told of real hunger; and the silence was most often broken by an outburst of irritability. In a few days time I could understand it; for I too perforce fasted; and I must own that a daily diet of dry bread for _déjeuner_ and of dry bread and octopus soup for dinner soon changed my outlook upon life. Little wonder then if these folk after six weeks of such treatment were nervous and excitable.

Such was the condition of body and mind in which they attended the long service of Good Friday night. Service I have said, but drama were a more fitting word, a funeral-drama. At the top of the nave, just below the chancel-step, stood a bier and upon it lay the figure of the Christ, all too death-like in the dim light. The congregation gaze upon him, reverently hushed, while the priests’ voices rise in prayer and chant as it were in lamentation for the dead God lying there in state. Hour after hour passes. The women have kissed the dead form, and are gone. The moment has come for carrying the Christ out to burial. The procession moves forward--in front, the priests with candles and torches and, guarded by them, the open bier borne shoulder-high--behind, a reverent, bare-headed crowd. The night is dark and gusty. It rains, and the rugged, tortuous alleys of the town are slippery. It is late, but none are sleeping. Unheeding of wind and rain, the women kneel at open door or window, praying, swinging censers, sprinkling perfume on the passing bier. Slowly, haltingly, led by the dirge of priests, now in darkness, now lighted by the torches’ flare and intermittent beams from cottage doorways, groping at corners, stumbling in ill-paved by-ways, the mourners follow their God to his grave. The circuit of the town is done. All have taken their last look upon the dead. The sepulchre is reached--a vault beneath the church from which the funeral started. The priests alone enter with the bier. There is a pause. The crowd waits. The silence is deep as the darkness, only broken here and there by a deep-drawn sigh. Is it the last depth of anguish, or is it well-nigh relief that the long strain is over? The priests return. In silence the crowd have waited, in silence they disperse. It is finished.

But there is a sequel on the morrow. Soon after dark on Easter-eve the same weary yet excited faces may be seen gathered in the church. But there is a change too; there is a feeling abroad of anxiety, of expectancy. Hours must yet pass ere midnight, and not till then is there hope of the announcement, ‘Christ is risen!’ The suspense seems long. To-night there is restlessness rather than silence. Some go to and fro between the church and their homes; others join discordantly in the chants and misplace the responses; anything to cheat the long hours of waiting. Midnight draws near; from hand to hand are passed the tapers and candles which shall light the joyful procession, if only the longed-for announcement be made. What is happening there now behind those curtains which veil the chancel from the expectant throng? Midnight strikes. The curtains are drawn back. Yes, there is the bier, borne but yesternight to the grave. It is empty. That is only the shroud upon it. The words of the priest ring out true, ‘Christ is risen!’ And there behind the chancel, see, a second veil is drawn back. There in the sanctuary, on the altar-steps, bright with a blaze of light stands erect the figure of the Christ who, so short and yet so long a while ago, was borne lifeless to the tomb. A miracle, a miracle! Quickly from the priest’s lighted candle the flame is passed. In a moment the dim building is illumined by a lighted taper in every hand. A procession forms, a joyful procession now. Everywhere are light and glad voices and the embraces of friends, crying aloud the news ‘Christ is risen’ and answering ‘He is risen indeed.’ In every home the lamb is prepared with haste, the wine flows freely; in the streets is the flash of torches, the din of fire-arms, and all the exuberance of simple joy. The fast is over; the dead has been restored to life before men’s eyes; well may they rejoice even to ecstasy. For have they not felt the ecstasy of sorrow? This was no tableau on which they looked, no drama in which they played a part. It was all true, all real. The figure on the bier was indeed the dead Christ; the figure on the altar-steps was indeed the risen Christ. In these simple folk religion has transcended reason; they have reached the heights of spiritual exaltation; they have seen and felt as minds more calm and rational can never see nor feel.

And the ancient Greeks, had not they too the gift of ecstasy, the faculty to soar above facts on the wings of imagination? When the drama of Demeter and Kore was played before the eyes of the initiated at Eleusis, were not they too uplifted in mind until amid the magic of night they were no longer spectators of a drama but themselves had a share in Demeter’s sorrow and wandering and joy? For the pagan story is not unlike the Christian story in its power to move both tears and gladness. As now men mourn beside the bier of Christ, so in old time may men have shared Demeter’s mourning for her child who though divine had suffered the lot of men and passed away to the House of Hades. As now men rejoice when they behold the risen Christ, so in old time may men have shared Demeter’s joy when her child returned from beneath the earth, proving that there is life beyond the grave. But the old story taught more than this. Not only did Kore live in the lower world, but her passing thither was not death but wedding. Therefore just as now the resurrection of Christ, who though divine is the representative of mankind, is held to be an earnest of man’s resurrection, so the wedded life of Kore in the nether world may have been to the initiated an assurance of the same bliss to be vouchsafed to them hereafter.

What was there then in this drama of Demeter and Kore at which the Christian writers could take offence or cavil? We do not of course know in what detail the story was represented; but the pivot on which the whole plot turned was necessarily the rape of Kore. Now it appears that in the play the part of Aïdoneus was taken by an hierophant and the part of Kore by a priestess; and it was the alleged indecency resulting therefrom which the fathers of the Church most severely censured. Asterius, after defending the Christians from the charge of worshipping saints as if they had been not human but divine, seeks to turn the tables on his pagan opponents by accusing them of deifying Demeter and Kore, whom he evidently regards as having once been human figures in mythology. Then he continues, ‘Is not Eleusis the scene of the descent into darkness, and of the solemn acts of intercourse between the hierophant and the priestess, alone together? Are not the torches extinguished, and does not the large, the numberless assembly of common people believe that their salvation lies in that which is being done by the two in the darkness[1445]?’ Again it was objected against the Valentinians by Tertullian that they copied ‘the whoredoms of Eleusis[1446],’ and from another authority we learn that part of the ceremonies of these heretics consisted in ‘preparing a nuptial chamber’ and celebrating ‘a spiritual marriage[1447].’ These two statements, read in conjunction, form a strong corroboration of the information given by Asterius; and we are bound to conclude that the scene of the rape of Kore was represented at Eleusis by the descent of the priest and priestess who played the chief parts into a dark nuptial chamber.

Now it is easy enough to suppose, as Sainte-Croix suggests[1448], that public morals were safeguarded by assigning the chief _rôles_ in the drama to persons of advanced age, or, as one ancient author states[1449], by temporarily and partially paralysing the hierophant with a small dose of hemlock. Whether each of the initiated was at any time conducted through the same ritual is uncertain. In the formulary of the Eleusinian rites, as recorded by Clement of Alexandria--‘I fasted; I drank the sacred potion (κυκεῶνα); I took out of the chest; having wrought (ἐργασάμενος) I put back into the basket and from the basket into the chest[1450]’--the expression ‘having wrought’ has been taken to be an euphemism denoting the same mystic union as between hierophant and priestess[1451]. If this view is correct, it would imply no doubt that full initiation required the candidate to go through the whole ritual in person; in this case it must be presumed that some precaution such as the dose of hemlock was taken in the interests of morality.

But the mere fact that a scene of rape should form any part of a religious rite, was to the Christians a stumbling-block. This was their insurmountable objection to the mysteries, and they were only too prone to exaggerate a ceremony, which with reverent and delicate treatment need have been in no way morally deleterious, into a sensual and noxious orgy. The story, how Demeter’s beautiful and innocent daughter was suddenly carried off from the meadow where she was gathering flowers into the depths of the dark under-world, spoke to them only of the violence and lust of her ravisher Aïdoneus. But the legend might bear another complexion. Kore, as representative of mankind or at least of the initiated among mankind, suffers what seems the most cruel lot, a sudden departure from this life in the midst of youth and beauty and spring-time; and Demeter searches for her awhile in vain, and mourns for her as men mourn their dead. Yet afterward it is found that there is no cruelty in Kore’s lot, for she is the honoured bride of the king of that world to which she was borne away; and Demeter is comforted, for her child is not dead nor lost to her, but is allowed to return in living form to visit her. What then must have been the ‘happier hopes’ held out to those who had looked on the great drama of Eleusis? What was meant by that prospect of being ‘god-beloved and sharing the life of gods’? How came it that the assembly of the initiated believed their salvation to lie in the union of Hades and Persephone, represented in the persons of hierophant and priestess, in the subterranean nuptial-chamber? What was the bearing of the legend dramatically enacted upon these hopes and prospects and beliefs? Surely it taught that not only was there physical life beyond death, but a life of wedded happiness with the gods.

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.

Again in the Sabazian mysteries, which some connect with Dionysus and others with Zeus, the little that is known of the ritual favours the view that here also the _motif_ was the marriage of the deity with his worshippers. According to Clement[1469], the subject-matter of these mysteries was a story that Zeus, having become by Demeter the father of Persephone, seduced in turn his own daughter, having as a means to that end transformed himself into a snake. That story, it may safely be said, is presented by Clement in its worst light; but the statement, that in the ritual the deity was represented by a snake, obtains some corroboration from Theophrastus, who says of the superstitious man, that if he see a red snake in his house he will invoke Sabazius[1470]. Now the token of these mysteries for those who were being initiated in them was, according to Clement[1471] again, ‘the god pressed to the bosom’ (ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός); which phrase he explains by saying that the god was represented as a snake, which was passed under the clothing and drawn over the bosom of the initiated ‘as a proof of the incontinence of Zeus.’ Clearly then the act of initiation was the symbolic wedding of the worshipper with the deity worshipped; and it is probable that the union which was symbolized in this life was expected to be realised in the next.

Finally in the orgiastic worship of Cybele the same religious doctrine is revealed. Here to Attis seems to be assigned the same part as to Adonis in the mysteries of Aphrodite. He is the beloved of the goddess; he is lost and mourned for as dead; he is restored again from the grave to the goddess who loved him. And in all this he appears to be the representative of all Cybele’s worshippers; for the ritual of initiation into her rites, if once again we may avail ourselves of Clement’s statements, is strongly imbued with the idea of marriage between the goddess and her worshipper. The several acts or stages of initiation are summarised in four phrases: ‘I ate out of the drum; I drank out of the cymbal; I carried the sacred vessel; I entered privily the bed-chamber--ἐκ τυμπάνου ἔφαγον· ἐκ κυμβάλου ἔπιον· ἐκερνοφόρησα· ὑπὸ τὸν παστὸν ὑπέδυν[1472]. In the passage from which these phrases are culled there appears to be a certain confusion between the rites of Cybele and those of Demeter; but the fact that Clement shortly afterwards gives another formulary of Demeter’s ritual is sufficient proof that he meant this present formulary, as indeed the mention of kettle-drum and cymbal[1473] suggests, to apply to the mysteries of Cybele[1474]. It appears then that the final act or stage of initiation consisted in the secret admission of the worshipper to the bed-chamber of the goddess. Such ritual can have borne only one interpretation. It clearly constituted a promise of wedded union between the initiated and their deity. Viewed in this light even the emasculation of the priests of Cybele may more readily be understood; it may have been the consecration of their virility to the service of the goddess, a final and convincing pledge of celibacy in this life, in return for which they aspired to be blest by wedlock with their goddess hereafter.

The mention of the goddess’ bed-chamber in the above passage is of considerable interest. The παστός (or παστάς) in relation to a temple meant the same thing as it often meant in relation to an ordinary house, an inner room or recess screened off, and in particular a bridal chamber. Such provision for the physical comfort of the deity was probably not rare. Pausanias tells us that on the right of the vestibule in the Argive Heraeum there was a couch (κλίνη) for Hera[1475], and he seems to speak of it as if it were a common enough piece of temple furniture. So too at Phlya in Attica, where were held the very ancient mystic rites ‘of her who is called the Great,’ there was a bridal chamber (παστάς), where, it has rightly been argued, there ‘must have been enacted a mimetic marriage[1476].’ Again Clement of Alexandria speaks of a παστός of Athena in the Parthenon, and makes it quite clear by the story which he relates that he understood the word in the sense of bed-chamber. The story is also for other reasons worth recalling, because it shows how the religious conception of marriage between men and gods was readily extended to the worship of other deities than those whose mysteries we have sought to unravel, and at the same time furnishes the only case known to me in which that mystic belief was prostituted to the base uses of flattery. The occasion was the reception accorded by the Athenians to Demetrius Poliorcetes. Not content with hailing him as a god in name, they went so far in their mean-spirited subjection as to set up a temple, at the place where he dismounted from his horse on entering their city, to Demetrius the Descender (Καταιβάτης)[1477], while on every side altars were erected to him. But their grossest piece of flattery was a master-piece of grotesque impiety, and met with a fitting reward. A marriage was arranged between him (the most notorious profligate of his age) and Athena. ‘He however,’ we are told, ‘disdained the goddess, being unable to embrace the statue, but took with him to the Acropolis the courtesan Lamia, and polluted the bed-chamber of Athena, exhibiting to the old virgin the postures of the young courtesan[1478].’ Even that contemptuous response to the Athenians’ flattery did not abash them, but, finding that he did not favour their acknowledged deity, they determined to deify his acknowledged favourite, and erected a temple to Lamia Aphrodite[1479].

But such travesties of holy things were rare; and this one notorious case excited the contempt alike of the man[1480] to whom the flattery was paid and of all posterity--a contempt which teaches, hardly less clearly than the indignation excited a century earlier by the supposed profanation of the mysteries, in what reverence and high esteem the idea of marriage between men and gods was generally held.

Even Lucian, in whom reverence was a less pronounced characteristic than humour, condemns seriously enough a parody of the mysteries of Eleusis which occurred in his own day; and his account of it at the same time shows once more that the marriage of men and gods was the very essence of the mysteries. The impostor Alexander, he says, instituted rites with carrying of torches (δᾳδουχία) and exposition of the sacred ceremonies (ἱεροφαντία) lasting for three days. “On the first there was a proclamation, as at Athens, as follows: ‘If any atheist, Christian, or Epicurean hath come to spy upon the holy rites, let him begone, and let the faithful be initiated with heaven’s blessing.’ Then first of all there was an expulsion of intruders. Alexander himself led the way, crying ‘Out with Christians,’ and the whole multitude shouted in answer ‘Out with Epicureans.’ Then was enacted the story of Leto in child-bed and the birth of Apollo, and his marriage with Coronis and the birth of Asclepius; and on the second day the manifestation of Glycon and the god’s birth[1481]. And on the third day was the wedding of Podalirius and Alexander’s mother; this was called the Torch-day, for torches were burnt. And finally there was the love of Selene and Alexander, and the birth of his daughter now married to Rutilianus[1482]. Our Endymion-Alexander was now torch-bearer and exponent of the rites. And he lay as it were sleeping in the view of all, and there came down to him from the roof--as it were Selene from heaven--a certain Rutilia, a very beautiful woman, the wife of one of Caesar’s household-officers, who was really in love with Alexander and was loved by him, and she kissed the rascal’s eyes and embraced him in the view of all, and, if there had not been so many torches, worse would perhaps have followed (τάχα ἄν τι καὶ τῶν ὑπὸ κόλπου ἐπράττετο)[1483].”

The inferences which may be drawn from this narrative are, first, that the mysteries in general, while reproducing in some dramatic form the whole story of the deities concerned, culminated in the representation of a mystic marriage between men and gods; (the birth of a child was also represented or announced in this parody, as we know that it was at Eleusis[1484], but it had, I am inclined to think, no mystic significance otherwise than as proof of the consummation of that marriage;) and, secondly, that the wild charges of indecency brought by early Christian writers against the mysteries are baseless; for Lucian condemns a much lesser license in this parody than that which they attributed to the genuine rites.

Thus our examination of the mysteries, so far as they are known to us, tends to prove that the doctrines revealed in them to the initiated were simply a development of certain vaguer popular ideas which have been prevalent among the Greek folk from the classical age down to our own day. The people entertained hopes that this physical life would continue in a similar form after death; the mysteries gave definite assurance of that immortality by exhibiting to the initiated Persephone or Adonis or Attis restored from the lower world in bodily form; and though that exhibition was in fact merely a dramatic representation, yet to the eyes of religious ecstasy it seemed just as much a living reality as does the risen Christ in the modern celebration of Easter. The people again were wont to think and to speak of death as a marriage into the lower world; the mysteries showed to the initiated certain representatives of mankind who by death, or even in life, had been admitted to the felicity of wedlock with deities, and thereby confirmed the faithful in their happier hopes of being in like manner themselves god-beloved and of sharing the life of gods.

Since then there is good reason to believe that this was in effect the secret teaching of the mysteries, it would naturally be expected that human marriage should have been reckoned as it were a foretaste of that union with the divine which was promised hereafter, and also that death should have been counted the hour of its approaching fulfilment; in other words, if my view of the mysteries is correct, it would almost inevitably follow that the mysteries should have been brought into close association both with weddings and with funerals. This expectation is confirmed by the facts.

An ordinary wedding was treated as something akin to initiation into the mysteries. An inscription of Cos[1485], relating to the appointment of priestesses of Demeter, mentions among other duties certain services on the occasion of weddings; and the brides, who are the recipients of these services, are divided into two classes, αἱ τελεύμεναι and αἱ ἐπινυμφευόμεναι, the maidens who, are being ‘initiated,’ and the widows who are being married again; a woman’s first marriage in fact is called by a religious document her initiation, and Demeter’s priestesses are charged therewith. Nor was this usage or idea confined to Cos; Plutarch speaks of services rendered by the priestess of Demeter in the solemnisation of matrimony as part of an ‘ancestral rite[1486]’; while the term τέλος was commonly used both of the mystic rites and of marriage, and τέλειοι might denote the newly-wed[1487].

The same thought seems also to have inspired another custom associated with marriage. The newly-wed, we hear, sometimes attended a representation of the marriage of Zeus and Hera[1488], an ἱερὸς γάμος which formed the subject of mystic drama or legend all over Greece[1489]. The widely extended cults of Hera under the titles of Maiden (παρθένος or παῖς) and of Bride (τελεία or νυμφευομένη) appear to have been closely interwoven; indeed for a full appreciation of the Greek conception of the goddess they must be treated as complementary. They are well interpreted by Farnell. Rejecting the theory of physical symbolism, he suggests ‘a more human explanation. Hera was essentially the goddess of women, and the life of women was reflected in her; their maidenhood and marriage were solemnised by the cults of Hera Παρθένος and Hera Τελεία or Νυμφευομένη, and the very rare worship of Hera Χήρα might allude to the not infrequent custom of divorce and separation[1490].’ With, Hera the Widow we are not here concerned, but only with the higher conceptions of Zeus and Hera as expressed in the representation of the ‘sacred marriage’; the bride and bridegroom who looked upon that saw in it, we may be sure, not a symbolical representation of the seasons and the productive powers of the earth, but rather the divine prototype of human marriage. It reminded them that deities, like mortals, were married and given in marriage, and it imparted to their wedding a sacramental character, making it at once a foretaste and a gage of that close communion with the gods which, when death the dividing line between mortals and immortals should once be passed, awaited the blessed among mankind.

Other small points too suggest the same trend of thought. The preliminaries of a wedding often comprised a sacrifice to Zeus Teleios and Hera Teleia[1491], and were called προτέλεια being the ‘preliminaries of initiation’ into that mystery, of which the sacred marriage, enacted before the now wedded pair, was the full revelation[1492]. Again these preliminaries always included the solemn ablution[1493] of which I have spoken above, and in this resembled the preparations for admittance to the mysteries. Moreover an instance is recorded in which this ablution was itself invested with the significance of a wedding between the human and the divine. The maidens of the Troad before marriage were wont to unrobe and bathe themselves in the Scamander; and the prayer which they made to the river-god, whose bed they entered, was, ‘Receive thou, Scamander, my virginity[1494].’ Finally the first night on which the wedded pair came together was known as the ‘mystic night’ (νὺξ μυστική)[1495], a term not a little suggestive of the great night of Demeter’s mysteries when to the eyes of the initiated was displayed the secret proof and promise of wedlock between men and gods hereafter. In short the ceremonies of a wedding by one means or another proclaimed it to be a form of initiation, and the estate of marriage was to the Greeks, as our prayer-book calls it, ‘an excellent mystery.’

Hence naturally followed the belief that the unmarried and the uninitiated shared the same fate in the future life. One conception of the punishment of the uninitiated was, according to Plato[1496], that they should carry water in a sieve to a broken jar; and this, as is well known, was also the lot of the Danaids in the nether world. Commenting on these facts Dr Frazer says, ‘It is possible that the original reason why the Danaids were believed to be condemned to this punishment in hell was not so much that they murdered, as that they did not marry, the sons of Aegyptus. According to one tradition indeed they afterwards married other husbands (Paus. III. 12. 2); but according to another legend they were murdered by Lynceus, apparently before marriage (Schol. on Euripides, _Hecuba_, 886). They may therefore have been chosen as types of unmarried women, and their punishment need not have been peculiar to them but may have been the one supposed to await all unmarried persons in the nether world[1497].’ A passage of Lucian, which appears to have been overlooked in this connexion[1498], converts the view of the Danaids which Dr Frazer considers possible into a practical certainty. The passage in point forms the conclusion of that dialogue in which Poseidon with the aid of Triton plots and carries out the rape of Amymone, the Danaid. She has just been seized and is protesting against her abduction and threatening to call her father, when Triton intervenes: ‘Keep quiet, Amymone,’ he says, ‘it is Poseidon.’ And the girl rejoins, ‘Oh, Poseidon you call him, do you?’ and then turning to her ravisher, ‘What do you mean, sirrah, by handling me so roughly, and dragging me down into the sea? I shall go under and be drowned, miserable girl.’ And Poseidon answers, ‘Do not be frightened, you shall come to no harm; no, I will strike the rock here, near where the waves break, with my trident, and will let a spring burst up which shall bear your name, and you yourself shall be blessed and, unlike your sisters, shall not carry water when you are dead (καὶ σὺ εὐδαίμων ἔσῃ καὶ μόνη τῶν ἀδελφῶν οὐχ ὑδροφορήσεις ἀποθανοῦσα)[1499].’ The whole point of Poseidon’s answer clearly depends upon the existence of a well-known belief that the Danaids were punished hereafter for remaining unmarried and that the punishment took the form of vainly fetching water for that bridal bath which was a necessary preliminary to a wedding; Amymone shall have a very thorough bridal bath, and the spring that bears her name shall be a monument of it, while she herself shall be ‘blessed’ by wedlock with Poseidon; thus shall she escape the fate of the unmarried. Clearly then there was no distinction between the uninitiated and the unmarried; both alike were doomed vainly to fetch water for those ablutions which preceded initiation into the mysteries or into matrimony; and once again the conception of marriage as a mystic and sacramental rite akin to the rites of Eleusis is clearly revealed.

It may further be noted here that this idea of the punishment of the unmarried completely explains the custom, on which I have already touched, of erecting a water-pitcher (λουτροφόρος) over the grave of unmarried persons. This intimated, according to Eustathius[1500], that the person there buried had never taken the bath which both bride and bridegroom were wont to take before marriage. But this must not be taken to mean that the water-pitcher was erected as a symbol of the punishment which the dead person was supposed to be undergoing; this was not an idea which his relatives and friends, even if they had held it, would have wished to blazon abroad. One might as soon expect to find depicted on a modern tombstone the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched. No; the water-pitcher was not a symbol, it was an instrument; for my part I have little faith in the existence of any symbols in popular religion which are not in origin at least instruments; and the purpose to which this instrument was put was to supply the dead person with that wedding-bath which he had not taken in life, and without which he would vainly strive in the under-world to prepare himself for divine wedlock. The water-pitcher was not commemorative, but preventive, of future punishment. Its erection was not a warning to the living, but a service to the dead.

Thus then the evidence for the intimate association of the mysteries, or of the main idea which runs through them, with human weddings is complete and, I hope, convincing; and the custom of the water-pitcher, which concludes it, fitly introduces at the same time the evidence for the association of the same idea with funerals. This is equally plentiful. The vague conception of death as a wedding, which as I have shown was elaborated in the mysteries, has of course already been exemplified in all those passages of ancient literature and modern folk-songs which I have adduced, and I have found in it also the motive for the assimilation of funeral-customs to the customs of marriage. But the evidence that the actual doctrines of the mysteries, in which more definite expression was given to that vague idea, were closely associated with death and funeral-custom is to be found rather in epitaphs and sepulchral monuments. The tone of the epitaphs may be sufficiently illustrated by a single couplet:

Οὐκ ἐπιδὼν νύμφεια λέχη κατέβην τὸν ἄφυκτον Γόργιππος ξανθῆς Φερσεφόνης θάλαμον[1501].

‘I, Gorgippus, lived not to look upon a bridal bed ere I went down to the chamber of bright-haired Persephone which none may escape.’ There is naturally here a note of lament, as befits any epitaph, and more especially that of one who dies young and unmarried; but none the less there is an anticipation--justified, we may think, if we will, by some ceremony of bridal ablution performed for the dead man by his friends--that his death is a wedding with the goddess of the under-world; and indeed the phrase Φερσεφόνης θάλαμος, ‘the bridal chamber of Persephone,’ recurs with some frequency in this class of epitaphs[1502].

Considered collectively, such epitaphs would suggest a distinctly offensive conception of Persephone; but in each taken separately, as it was composed, it will be allowed, I think, that if there is supreme audacity, there is equal sublimity. It is just these qualities which give pungency to a blasphemous parody of such epitaphs, in which the wit of Ausonius exposes the worst possible aspect of a religious conception which to the pure-minded was wholly pure. My apology for quoting lines which I will not translate must be the fact that a caricature is often no less instructive than a true portrait. The mock epitaph concludes as follows:

Sed neque functorum socius miscebere vulgo Nec metues Stygios flebilis umbra lacus: Verum aut Persephonae Cinyreius ibis Adonis, Aut Jovis Elysii tu catamitus eris[1503].

Ausonius in jest bears an unpleasant resemblance to Clement in earnest; both perverted to their uttermost a doctrine which commanded nothing but reverence from faithful participants in the mysteries.

Akin to these epitaphs are certain tablets which recently have been fully discussed by Miss Jane Harrison[1504], and have been shown to be of Orphic origin. They were buried with the dead, and for this reason were more outspoken in their references to the mystic doctrines than was permissible in epitaphs exposed to the vulgar gaze. The most complete of these tablets is one which was found near Sybaris, and, with the exception of the last sentence of all, the inscription is in hexameter verse. Miss Harrison, to whose work I am wholly indebted for this valuable evidence, translates as follows[1505]:

‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below, Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal. For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race, But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal ... starflung thunderbolt. I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel. I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired. I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld. I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired. Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal. A kid I have fallen into milk.’

The gist of the document which the dead man takes with him is then briefly this. He claims to have been pure originally and of the same race as his gods; but as a man he was mortal and exposed to death, and in this respect differed from his gods. He states however that he has performed certain ritual acts which entitle him to be re-admitted to the pure fellowship of the gods now that death is passed. And the answer comes, ‘Thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

Now here I wish to consider one only of these ritual acts--that one of which the meaning is clearest--Δεσποίνας δ’ ὑπὸ κόλπον ἔδυν χθονίας βασιλείας, which means, if I may give my own rendering, ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the under-world.’ The phrase is one which repeats the idea which we have already seen expressed in the formulary of Cybele’s rites, ὑπὸ τὸν παστὸν ὑπέδυν[1506], ‘I was privily admitted to the bridal chamber,’ and in the token of the Sabazian mysteries, ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός[1507], ‘the god pressed to the bosom’; and Lucian’s final phrase in his account of Alexander’s mock-mysteries shows a kindred phrase, τὰ ὑπὸ κόλπου[1508], as an euphemism of the same kind[1509]. The Orphic therefore no less than others based his claim to future happiness on the fact that he had performed a ritual act, of the nature of a sacrament, which constituted a pledge that the wedlock between him and his goddess foreshadowed here should be consummated hereafter.

Even more abundant evidence is furnished by sepulchral monuments; and in support of my views I cannot do better than quote two high authorities who coincide in their verdict upon the meaning of the scenes represented. In reference to those scenes ‘in which death is conceived in the guise of a marriage’ Furtwängler writes: ‘The monuments belonging to this class are extraordinarily numerous, and exhibit very different methods of treating the idea which they carry out. A relief upon a sarcophagus from the Villa Borghese shows the God of the dead in the act of carrying down the fair Kore to be his bride in the lower world. Above the steeds of his chariot, which are already disappearing into the depths of the earth, flies Eros as guide. The bride however appears to be going only under compulsion and after some struggle; the look of the bridegroom expresses sternness rather than gentleness; and the mother who sits with face averted seems to exclude all thoughts of the daughter’s return. Only in the torches which the guide carries in his hand, in the snakes which are looking upward, and in the observant attitude of Hecate, can a suggestion of the return be found.

‘On another sarcophagus--from Nazzara--which represents the same marriage-journey, Eros is not merely the guide of the steeds, but aids the bridegroom in carrying off Kore, so that in this case the struggle with death takes purely the form of a struggle with love. At the same time the mother is driving along with her chariot, thereby signifying the renewal of life, which is yet more clearly betokened in the ploughman and the sower at her side.

‘In a yet gentler spirit we see the same journey conceived in a vase-painting from lower Italy. Here there is a look of gentleness on Hades’ face; the bride accompanies him gladly, and even takes an affectionate farewell of her mother, who appears to acquiesce in her departure. In this case too Eros is flying above the horses, and is turned towards the lovers, while in front of him there flies a dove, the bird sacred to the goddess of love. Hecate with torches guides the steeds; near at hand waits Hermes to escort the procession; and above the whole scene the stars are shining, as if to indicate the new life in the region of death.

‘In another form, exalted to a yet higher holiness, the same marriage is repeated in the sphere of Dionysus-worship. Thus on a cameo in the Vatican, Dionysus is represented driving with his bride, Ariadne, in a brightly-decked triumphal car. Holy rapture is manifested on the features of both, and on top of the chariot stands a Cupid directing it. Dionysus is arrayed in the doe-skin, and holds in his left hand a _thyrsus_, in his right a goblet; Ariadne is carrying ears of corn and poppy-heads, and has her hair wreathed with vine-leaves. The car is drawn by Centaurs of both sexes, with torches, drinking-horns, and musical instruments. The idea which underlies this scene is the reproduction of Life out of Death; Hades has issued forth again for a new marriage-bond with Kore in the realm of light, appearing now rejuvenated in the form of Dionysus, just as his bride assumes the form of Ariadne, and because the power of death is broken behind him, his car likewise becomes a triumphal car.

‘Just as the marriage of Zeus in the realm of light became a type for men in this life, so the marriage of Hades, or of Dionysus representing him, developed into a similar prototype for the dead. Since that which is true of Death bears directly upon the actual dead, it was quite natural that gradually the process of death came to be considered in general as a wedding with the deities of death. With this conception too harmonize those wedding-scenes which are so common and conspicuous on funeral monuments, as well as the often-recurring scenes from the joyous cycle of Dionysus-myths[1510].’ Two brief comments may be made upon this passage. First, Furtwängler clearly recognises in Dionysus a mere substitute for Hades, and thus confirms my interpretation of the strange legend concerning Dionysus and Prosymnus[1511]. We noticed that the somewhat obscure observation of Heraclitus (as quoted by Clement) upon that story contained the words ‘Dionysus and Hades are one and the same’; and we now see that in art too the same identification was made, and that the marriage of a mortal with Dionysus was used to typify the future marriage of the dead with their gods. The reason for this identification seems simply to be that the cults in which the two gods figured, although differing in outward form, were felt to express one and the same idea--namely the conception of death as a form of marriage; and the tendency to identify in such cases was carried so far that the god Dionysus was even, we are told, identified with the mortal Adonis[1512], presumably because the worship of each, as I have shown above, turned upon this one cardinal doctrine.

Secondly, Furtwängler points out that the marriage of Zeus and Hera represented for living men the same doctrine as the marriage of Hades and Persephone (or of Dionysus and Ariadne) represented for the dead. The truth of this is well illustrated by the close resemblance between Aristophanes’ picture of Hera’s wedding and those funeral monuments and vases which Furtwängler describes; for there too ‘golden-winged Eros held firm the reins, and drave the wedding-car of Zeus and blessed Hera[1513].’ In other words, this Olympian marriage was only one among several mystic marriages which all conveyed, though in diverse form, the same lesson, that marriage was the perfection of divine life no less than of human life, and therefore that hereafter when men, or at any rate the blessed and initiated among men, should come to dwell with their gods, no bond of communion between gods and men could be perfect short of the marriage-bond.

It was natural enough that the drama of Hera’s wedding with Zeus should most often have been chosen to be played at an ordinary wedding, because it would not obtrude thoughts of death upon a joyous event with such insistence as most of the other religious legends which reposed upon the same fundamental doctrine; but sometimes, we know, it was the priestesses of Demeter who officiated at wedding-ceremonies, and in those cases it cannot be doubted that it was Persephone and not Hera who was the divine prototype of the bride, and the thought that her wedding was a wedding with the god of death could not have been excluded. At funerals, on the other hand, the story of Zeus and Hera which was preferred at weddings owing to its less obvious allusion to death, would for that same reason have found less favour than those other marriage-legends in which the identity of death with marriage was more clearly enunciated; and of these, owing to the exceptional reverence in which the Eleusinian mysteries were held, the story of Persephone seems to have been among the most frequent. Yet in the picture drawn by Aristophanes at which we have just glanced, for one subtle touch which suggests the connexion of Hera’s wedding with human weddings, there is another subtle touch which suggests its relation with human death. The first is an epithet applied to Eros who drove the wedding-car--the epithet ἀμφιθαλής, used of one who has both parents living[1514]. The allusion to human weddings is clear. It was no doubt imperative in old time, as it still is, in Greece, that anyone who attended upon a bride or bridegroom, as for instance the bearer of water for the bridal bath, should have both parents living; and the use of the same term in reference to Eros, the attendant upon Zeus and Hera, marks the intimate connexion between the divine marriage and the marriage of living men and women. But another epithet in the passage conveys no less clear an allusion to the marriage of those, whom men call dead, with their deities. Hera is named εὐδαίμων, a word which, meaning ‘favoured by God,’ may seem strangely applied to one who herself was divine[1515]. But it was selected by Aristophanes for a good reason; by the word εὐδαιμονία was commonly denoted that future bliss which the initiated believed to consist in wedlock with their deities. Like θεοφιλής, ‘god-beloved,’ the term εὐδαίμων, ‘blessed,’ was, so to speak, a catch-word of the mysteries[1516]; and the application of it to Hera in Aristophanes’ ode brings the legend of Hera’s marriage into rank with those other wedding-stories whose actual plot hinged upon the identity of death and marriage. Thus though one legend might be more appropriate in its externals to one occasion, and another legend to another occasion, the ultimate and fundamental idea of them all was single and the same.

This view is boldly championed by the second authority whom I proposed to quote upon the subject of mystic marriage-scenes depicted on funeral-monuments. ‘The idea,’ says Lenormant, ‘of mystic union in death is frequently indicated in the scenes represented upon _sarcophagi_ and painted vases. But for the most part the idea is expressed there only in an allusive manner, which depends upon the identification which this marriage-scene established between the dead person and the deity, by means of such subjects as the carrying off of Cephalus by Aurora, or Orithyia by Boreas, or the love-story of Aphrodite and Adonis[1517].’ ‘Thus,’ he explains, ‘a girl carried off (by death) from her parents was simply a bride betrothed to the infernal god, and was identified with Demeter’s maiden daughter, the victim of the passion and violence of Hades; a young man cut off by an early fate figured as the beautiful Adonis, snatched away by Persephone from the love of Aphrodite, and brought, in spite of himself, to the bed of the queen of the lower world[1518].’ The identification which Lenormant sees in these several instances is an identification, I suppose, not of personalities but of destinies. The popular religion of ancient Greece shows little trace of any pantheistic view which would have contemplated the absorption of the personality of the dead man or woman into that of any god or goddess. Indeed the very number of the personally distinct deities with whom, on such an hypothesis, the dead would have been identified, as well as that continuance of sexual difference in the future life which is postulated by the very doctrine before us, precludes all thought of personal identification. Rather it is the future destiny of the dead person which was identified with the destiny of the deity or hero whose marriage was represented on sarcophagus or _cippus_ or commemorative vase[1519]. The lot of Kore or Ariadne or Orithyia prefigured the lot of mortal women hereafter; the fortunes of Adonis or Cephalus typified those of mortal men; and all the marriage-scenes alike, whatever the differences of presentation, revealed the hope and the promise of wedlock hereafter between mankind and their deities.

But Lenormant mentions one vase-painting[1520] in which this fundamental doctrine is taught not by parables of mythology, but more overtly and directly. The scene depicted is the marriage of a youth, whose name, Polyetes, is in pathetic contrast with his short span of years spent upon earth, with a goddess Eudaemonia (or ‘Bliss’) in the lower world. In this deity Lenormant sees ‘the infernal goddess under an euphemistic name.’ Nor could any more significant name have been used. It has already been pointed out that εὐδαιμονία was a term much favoured by the initiated in the mysteries, and was openly used by them to denote that future bliss which secretly was understood to consist in divine wedlock. Hence the scene upon this vase would at once suggest to those who were familiar with the doctrines of the mysteries, that the youth, being presumably of the number of the initiated, had found in death the realisation of his happy hopes and had entered into blissful union with the goddess of the lower world.

* * * * *

To sum up briefly: we have seen alike in the literature of ancient Greece and in the folk-songs of modern Greece that death has commonly been conceived by the Hellenic race in the guise of a wedding; a review of marriage-customs and funeral-customs both ancient and modern has re-affirmed the constant association of death and marriage, and has shown how deep-rooted in the minds of the common people that idea must have been which produced a deliberate assimilation of funeral-rites to the ceremonies of marriage. Next we investigated the connexion of the mysteries with the popular religion, and saw reason to hold that, far from being subversive of it or alien to it, they inculcated doctrines which were wholly evolved from vaguer popular ideas always current in Greece. Finally we traced in many of those legends, on which the dramatic representations of the mysteries are known to have been based, a common _motif_, the idea that death is the entrance for men into a blissful estate of wedded union with their deities. And this religious ideal not only satisfies the condition of agreement with, and evolution from, those popular views in which death figured somewhat vaguely as a form of wedding, but also proves to be the natural and necessary outcome of two religious sentiments with which earlier chapters have dealt; first, the ardent desire for close communion with the gods, and secondly, the belief that men’s bodies as well as their souls survived death and dissolution; for if the body by means of its disintegration rejoined the soul in the nether world, and the human entity was then complete, enjoying the same substantial existence, the same physical no less than mental powers, which it had enjoyed in the upper world, and which the immortal gods enjoyed uninterrupted by death, then, since the same rite of marriage was the consummation both of divine life and of human life, men’s yearning for close communion with their gods required for its ideal and perfect satisfaction the full union of wedlock; and the sacrament which assured men of this consummation was the highest development of the whole Greek religion, the mysteries.

Such a sacrament and such aspirations might well have offended even those Christians of early days, if such there were, who were willing to deal sympathetically with paganism; that those who were its declared enemies, and were ready to use against it the weapons of perversion and vituperation, found in this conception a vulnerable point, is readily understood. It is true indeed that in the very idea which they most vilified there was a certain curious analogy between the new religion and the old. Just as paganism allowed to each man or woman individually the hope of becoming the bridegroom or the bride of one of their many deities, so Christianity represented the Church, the whole body of the faithful collectively, as the bride of its sole deity. But the analogy is superficial only. The bond of feeling which united the Church with God was very differently conceived from that which drew together the pagans and their deities. The chastened ‘charity’ (ἀγάπη) of the Christians had little in common with the passionate love (ἔρως) with which the Greeks of old time had dared look upon their gods. Theirs was the Love that ‘held firm the reins and drave the wedding-car of Zeus and blessed Hera[1521]’; the Love that hovered above the steeds of Hades and changed for Persephone the road of death into a road to bliss; the Love whom ‘no immortal may escape nor any of mankind whose life passeth it as a day, but whoso hath him is as one mad[1522]’; and the only true consummation of such love was wedlock.

This conception necessarily implied the equality of men with their gods in the future life; and that future equality was sometimes represented as no more than a return to that which was in the beginning. ‘One is the race of men with the race of gods; for one is the mother that gave to both our breath; yet are they sundered by powers wholly diverse, in that mankind is as naught, but heaven is builded of brass that abideth ever unshaken[1523].’ So sang Pindar of the past and of the present; but the Orphic tablet which has been already quoted carries on the thought into the future:

‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below, Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal. For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race, But Fate laid me low....’

So far with Pindar. But the dead man’s claims do not end there: ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld’; already had he received a foretaste of that divine wedlock which implied equality with the gods; and so there comes the answer, ‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

This idea commended itself even to thinkers who did not believe in bodily survival after death. Plato, in the _Phaedo_, where above all things is taught the perishable nature of the body and the immortality of the soul alone, yet avails himself of the belief that the pure among mankind shall attain even to godhead hereafter. To him the pure are not the initiated indeed, but the earnest strivers after wisdom. In his theory of retributive metempsychosis he surmises that those who have followed the lusts of the flesh shall hereafter enter the ranks of asses and other lustful beasts; that those who have wrought violence shall enter the ranks of wolves and hawks and kites; that those who have practised what is popularly accounted virtue, but without true understanding, shall enter the ranks of harmless and social creatures, bees, wasps, and ants, or even the ranks of men once more. ‘But into the ranks of gods none may enter without having followed after wisdom and so departing hence wholly pure--none save the lover of knowledge[1524].’ What precise meaning Plato attached to his phrase ‘to enter the ranks’ (εἰς γένος ἐνδύεσθαι or ἀφικνεῖσθαι), to which he adheres throughout the passage, is a question which agitated the Neoplatonists[1525] somewhat needlessly. The phrase is intended either literally throughout or allegorically throughout. If it be allegorical, the meaning must be that all human souls shall enter again into human bodies, but that they shall start this new phase of existence with the qualities of lust, violence, respectability, or real virtue and purity, acquired in the previous life--merely resembling, as nearly as men may, asses, wolves, bees, or gods. Now as regards the first three classes, this allegorical interpretation, if a little forced, is feasible enough; but what of the fourth class? Shall the soul which has attained purity, the very negation of fleshliness in Plato’s view, suffer re-incarnation and struggle once more against the flesh? Surely the allegorical explanation is at once condemned. The phrase was intended literally[1526]. Plato signified the re-incarnation of the lustful, the violent, and the merely respectable, in the forms of animals of like character, and he signified--I must not say the re-incarnation, for Plato’s gods were spiritual and not carnal--but the regeneration of the pure in the form of gods. And in the same spirit Plutarch too contemplated the possibility of some men’s souls becoming first heroes, and from heroes rising to the rank of ‘daemons,’ and from ‘daemons’ coming to share, albeit but rarely, in real godhead[1527].

Thus even the highest aspirations of the most spiritually-minded of pagan thinkers owed much to the purely popular religion. The Orphic tablet links up the popular conception of death as a wedding with the Platonic conception of the deification of the soul. ‘I was admitted to the embrace of Despoina, Queen of the underworld’: ‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

But if Plato, even in his conception of a purely spiritual life hereafter, owed something to the popular religion, he drew upon it far more freely in his conception of Love. In the _Symposium_ one speech after another culminates in the assertion of that belief which found its highest expression in the mysteries. ‘So then I say,’ says Phaedrus, ‘that Love is the most venerable of the gods, the most worthy of honour, the most powerful to grant virtue and blessedness unto mankind both in life and after death[1528].’ And in the same tone too Eryximachus: ‘He it is that wields the mightiest power and is the source for us of all blessedness and of our power to have loving fellowship both with one another and with the gods that are stronger than we[1529].’ And finally Aristophanes: It is Love, ‘who in this present life gives us most joys by drawing like unto like, and for our hereafter displays hopes most high, if we for our part display piety towards the gods, that he will restore us to our erstwhile nature and will heal us and will make us happy and blessed[1530].’

This is not Platonic philosophy but popular religion. Phrase after phrase reveals the origin of this conception of Love. The hopes most high were the hopes held forth by the mysteries; the blessedness and the loving fellowship with gods were the fulfilment of those hopes. In such language did men ever hint at the joys to which their mystic sacraments gave access. And Plato here ventures yet further. The author of those high hopes, the founder of that blessedness, he proclaims, is none other than Love--Love that appealed not to the soul only of the initiated, but to the whole man, both soul and body--Love that meant not only the yearning after wisdom and holiness and spiritual equality with the gods, but that same passion which drew together man and woman, god and goddess--the passion of mankind for their deities, fed in this life by manifold means of communion and even by sacramental union, satisfied hereafter in the full fruition of wedded bliss.

FOOTNOTES:

[1358] _Il._ XI. 241.

[1359] Hes. _W. and D._ 116.

[1360] e.g. Hom. _Il._ XVI. 454 and 672; XIV. 231.

[1361] Hes. _Theog._ 212, 756.

[1362] See Preller, _Griech. Myth._ I. 690 ff.

[1363] Paus. V. 18. 1. Cf. III. 18. 1.

[1364] Passow, _Popul. Carm._ CCCXCVI.

[1365] Hom. _Od._ XXIV. 1.

[1366] Virg. _Aen._ IV. 242 ff.

[1367] See above, pp. 96 ff. and pp. 134 ff.

[1368] Paus. VIII. 2. 5.

[1369] Paus. _ibid._ § 4.

[1370] Passow, _Pop. Carm._ no. 364.

[1371] Passow, _Pop. Carm._ no. 374.

[1372] The word χαρὰ, (‘joy’), as I have pointed out elsewhere, is indeed often used technically of marriage.

[1373] Passow, _Pop. Carm._ no. 38 (ll. 13-18) and also nos. 65, 152, 180.

[1374] See above, pp. 255 ff.

[1375] Abbott, _Macedon. Folklore_, p. 255.

[1376] Passow, _Pop. Carm._ no. 370. The phrase κάνει χαρὰ, which I have inadequately rendered as ‘maketh glad,’ is technically used of marriage. See above, p. 127.

[1377] For authorities see Lobeck, _Aglaoph._ I. pp. 76 ff.

[1378] Soph. _Antig._ 574-5. I do not know how much stress may be laid on the repetition of the pronoun ὅδε in these two lines (viz. στερήσεις τῆσδε and τούσδε τοὺς γάμους); but the lines follow closely on that in which Creon bids Ismene speak no more of Antigone as ἥδε, and an ironical stress might well be laid by Creon on the word τούσδε as he uses it, which would suggest to his audience its antithesis τοὺς ἐκεὶ γάμους.

[1379] Soph. _Antig._ 804-5.

[1380] _ibid._ 810-16.

[1381] _ibid._ 891-2.

[1382] _ibid._ 1203-7.

[1383] _ibid._ 1240-1.

[1384] Pindar, _Fragm._ 139 (Bergk).

[1385] Aesch. _Prom._ 940 ff.

[1386] _Oneirocr._ II. 49. The word τέλη denotes here not merely a ‘rite,’ but a ‘consummation’ by which a man becomes τέλειος. See below, p. 591.

[1387] _ibid._ I. 80. To translate the passage more fully is not convenient; I append the original: θεῷ δὲ ἢ θεᾷ μιγῆναι ἢ ὑπὸ θεοῦ περανθῆναι νοσοῦντι μὲν θάνατον σημαίνει· τότε γὰρ ἡ ψυχὴ τὰς τῶν θεῶν συνόδους τε καὶ μίξεις μαντεύεται, ὅταν ἐγγὺς ᾖ τοῦ καταλιπεῖν τὸ σῶμα ᾧ ἐνοικεῖ.

[1388] _ibid._ II. 65.

[1389] _Oneirocr._ II. 49.

[1390] The majority of the references to ancient usage given below are borrowed from Becker’s _Charicles_.

[1391] Thuc. II. 15.

[1392] Eur. _Phoen._ 347.

[1393] Aeschines, _Epist._ X. p. 680.

[1394] Cf. Pollux, III. 43.

[1395] Soph. _Antig._ 901.

[1396] _De Luctu_, 11.

[1397] Abbott, _Macedonian Folklore_, p. 193.

[1398] For a discussion of this point see Becker, _Charicles_ pp. 483-4.

[1399] Harpocrat. s.v. λουτροφόρος. ἔθος δὲ ἦν καὶ τοῖς ἀγάμοις ἀποθανοῦσι λουτροφορεῖν, καὶ ἐπὶ τὸ μνῆμα ἐφίστασθαι. τοῦτο δὲ ἦν παῖς ὑδρίαν ἔχων. The same words are repeated by Photius and Suidas. With ἐφίστασθαι it appears necessary to supply λουτροφόρον. Cf. Pollux VIII. 66 τῶν δ’ ἀγάμων λουτροφόρος τῷ μνήματι ἐφίστατο, κόρη ἀγγεῖον ἔχουσα ὑδροφόρον.... For other references see Becker, _Charicles_ p. 484. This information, as regards the emblem used, is held to be incorrect. The λουτροφόρος was not a boy bearing a pitcher, but the pitcher itself. See Frazer, _Pausanias_, vol. V. p. 388.

[1400] For this view see Frazer, _Pausanias_, vol. V. p. 389. ‘It may be suggested that originally the custom of placing a water-pitcher on the grave of unmarried persons ... may have been meant to help them to obtain in another world the happiness they had missed in this. In fact it may have been part of a ceremony designed to provide the dead maiden or bachelor with a spouse in the spirit land. Such ceremonies have been observed in various parts of the world by peoples, who, like the Greeks, esteemed it a great misfortune to die unmarried.’

[1401] _Plut._ 529.

[1402] Cf. Lucian, _de Luctu_ 11.

[1403] For a discussion of the point in relation to funerals see Becker, _Charicles_ pp. 385 f. and in relation to marriage pp. 486 f.

[1404] Lucian, _de Luctu_ 11.

[1405] I. 6.

[1406] Cf. Passow, _Popul. Carm. Graec. Recent._ no. 415, and Tournefort, _Voyage du Levant_, I. p. 153, who describes a dead woman, whose funeral he witnessed, as ‘parée à la Gréque de ses habits de nôces.’

[1407] Passow, _Popul. Carm._ 378.

[1408] _Charicles_ p. 487.

[1409] Lucian, _de Luctu_ 11. Aristoph. _Lysist._ 602 etc.

[1410] The influence of the Church was against the use of garlands in early times and perhaps suppressed it in some districts. Cf. Minucius, p. 109 ‘Nec mortuos coronamus. Ergo vos (the heathen) in hoc magis miror, quemadmodum tribuatis exanimi aut [non] sentienti facem aut non sentienti coronam: cum et beatus non egeat, et miser non gaudeat floribus.’ The first _non_ is clearly to be deleted.

[1411] Cf. Abbott, _Macedonian Folklore_, p. 193.

[1412] Cf. _ibid._ p. 197.

[1413] Hom. _Hymn. in Demet._ 372 ff. Hence the pomegranate was treated as ‘an accursed thing’ in the worship of Demeter at Lycosura, Paus. VIII. 37. 7.

[1414] Paus. II. 17. 4.

[1415] See above, p. 548.

[1416] See above, p. 80.

[1417] The following references are in the main taken from Lobeck, _Aglaophamus_.

[1418] Soph. _Fragm._ 719 (Dind.).

[1419] Hom. _Hymn. ad Cer._ 480 ff.

[1420] Pind. _Fragm._ 137 (Bergk).

[1421] Id. _Fragm._ 129. See above, p. 518.

[1422] Aristoph. _Ranae_ 440-459.

[1423] Isocr. _Paneg._ p. 46.

[1424] _Aglaoph._ I. p. 70.

[1425] περὶ εἰρήνης, p. 166.

[1426] Aristid. _Eleusin._ 259 (454).

[1427] Julian. _Or._ VII. 238. The same story in similar words recurs in Diog. Laert. VI. 39 and Plut. _de Aud. Poet._ II. p. 21 F.

[1428] Crinagoras, _Ep._ XXX.

[1429] Cic. _de Leg._ II. § 36.

[1430] _Mathem._ I. p. 18, ed. Buller.

[1431] _Aglaoph._ I. pp. 39 f.

[1432] See Lobeck, _Aglaoph._ I. pp. 6 ff.

[1433] Diodorus, v. 77. Cf. Miss Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 567.

[1434] For references on this point, see Lobeck, _Aglaophamus_, I. 14 ff.

[1435] For the evidence that the Achaeans adopted the language of the Pelasgians, and not _vice versâ_, see Ridgeway, _Early Age of Greece_, vol. I. p. 631 ff.

[1436] _Protrept._ § 55.

[1437] Hom. _Il._ I. 221 f.

[1438] Euseb. _Demonstr. Evang._ V. 1, 268 E.

[1439] _Praep. Evang._ XV. 1, 788 C.

[1440] Προτρεπτ. § 61.

[1441] Synes. _de Prov._ II. 124 B.

[1442] Cf. Artemid. _Oneirocr._ Bk III. cap. 61.

[1443] In Thera, as I myself witnessed, and until recently at Delphi. Greeks with whom I have spoken of this custom have often seen or heard of it somewhere.

[1444] I regret that my notes contain no mention of my informant’s name. I must apologise to him for the omission.

[1445] Asterius, _Encom. in SS. Martyr._ in Migne, _Patrolog. Graeco-Lat._ vol. XL. p. 324.

[1446] _Adv. Valentin._ cap. I.

[1447] Eusebius, _Hist. Eccles._ IV. 11. Cf. Sainte-Croix, _Recherches sur les Mystères_, 2nd ed., I. p. 366.

[1448] _loc. cit._

[1449] [Origen] _Philosophumena_, p. 115 (ed. Miller), p. 170 (ed. Cruice). Cf. Miss J. Harrison, _Proleg. to Study of Gk Relig._ p. 549.

[1450] Clem. Alex. _Protrept._ II. 18.

[1451] Dieterich, _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_, p. 125, cited by Miss J. Harrison, _Proleg. to Study of Gk Relig._ p. 155, note 3.

[1452] Hesiod, _Theog._ 970 f. Cf. Hom. _Od._ V. 125.

[1453] Theocr. _Id._ III. 49 ff. (A. Lang’s translation).

[1454] Plutarch, _de fac. in orb. lun._ 28, cited by Miss Harrison, _Proleg. to Study of Gk Relig._ p. 267.

[1455] See above, pp. 91 f. and 96 ff.

[1456] Theocr. _Id._ III. 46 ff.

[1457] _Protrept._ § 14.

[1458] Theocr. _Id._ XV. 86.

[1459] _Orph. Hymn._ LVI.; Bion, _Id._ I. 5. 54; Lucian, _Dial. deor._ XI. 1; Macrob. _Saturn._ I. 21; Procop. _in Esai._ XVIII. p. 258. Cf. Lenormant, _Monogr. de la voie sacrée éleusin._, where many other references are given.

[1460] Dem. Κατὰ Νεαίρας, pp. 1369-1371 _et passim_. Cf. Arist. Ἀθην. Πολ. 3.

[1461] _Etymol. Mag._ 227. 36.

[1462] Hesych. s.v. γεραραί.

[1463] See above, pp. 339 ff.

[1464] Plutarch, _de defectu orac._ cap. 14 (p. 417).

[1465] See above, p. 139.

[1466] Not so, however, to Artemidorus. Cf. _Oneirocr._ I. 80.

[1467] _Protrept._ § 34.

[1468] _l. c._

[1469] _Protrept._ § 16.

[1470] Theophr. _Char._ 28 (ed. Jebb).

[1471] _l. c._

[1472] Clem. Alex. _Protrept._ II. 15.

[1473] The cymbal certainly belonged to Demeter also (see Miss Harrison, _op. cit._ p. 562) but not, I think, the kettle-drum.

[1474] Psellus (_Quaenam sunt Graecorum opiniones de daemonibus_, 3, ed. Migne) refers the formulary to the rites of Demeter and Kore. But I cannot agree with Miss J. Harrison (_Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 569) as to the importance of Psellus’ testimony in any respect. He appears to me to give no more than a _résumé_ of information derived from Clement’s _Protreptica_, misunderstood and even more confused.

[1475] Paus. II. 17. 3.

[1476] Miss J. Harrison, _op. cit._ p. 536, commenting on _Philosophumena_, ed. Cruice, v. 3.

[1477] A title under which both Zeus and Hermes were known; see Aristoph. _Pax_, 42, and Schol. _ibid._ 649.

[1478] Clem. Alex. _Protrept._ § 54.

[1479] Athen. VI. p. 253 A. Shortly afterwards he quotes a song (253 D) in which it is the name of Demeter which is coupled with that of Demetrius.

[1480] Athen. VI. 253 A, and 261 B.

[1481] Glycon was Alexander’s new god, a re-incarnation of Asclepius, born in the form of a snake out of an egg discovered by Alexander.

[1482] A superstitious old Roman entrapped by Alexander.

[1483] Lucian, _Alexander seu Pseudomantis_, cap. 38-39 (II. 244 ff.).

[1484] See Miss J. Harrison, _op. cit._ pp. 549 ff.

[1485] Paton, _Inscr. of Cos_, 386, cited by Rouse, _Greek Votive Offerings_, p. 246.

[1486] Plutarch, _Conjug. Praec. ad init._

[1487] Schol. _ad Soph. Antig._ 1241.

[1488] Photius, _Lex. Rhet._ Vol. II. p. 670 (ed. Porson), cited by Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, I. p. 245.

[1489] For the chief references, see Farnell, _loc. cit._

[1490] Farnell, _op. cit._ p. 191.

[1491] Diod. Sic. V. 73; Pollux III. 38. Cf. Farnell, _op. cit._ p. 246.

[1492] Pollux, _l. c._ ταύτῃ (τῇ Ἤρᾳ) τοῖς προτελείοις προὐτέλουν τὰς κόρας.

[1493] Cf. Plutarch, _Amator. Narrat._ 1, where the girls of Haliartus are said to have bathed themselves in the spring Cissoessa immediately before making the sacrifices just mentioned, and evidently as part of the same ritual.

[1494] [Aeschines] _Epist._ 10, p. 680.

[1495] Chariton IV. 4.

[1496] _Gorgias_, p. 493 B.

[1497] Frazer, _ad Pausan._ X. 31. 9 (vol. V. p. 389).

[1498] I cannot pretend to have gone into the whole literature of the subject, but I find no reference to this passage either in Dr Frazer’s _Pausanias_, _l. c._, or in Miss Harrison’s _Proleg. to Study of Gk Relig._ pp. 614 ff., where the same topic is fully discussed.

[1499] Lucian, _Dial. Marin._ 6. 3.

[1500] Eustath. _ad Hom. Il._ XXIII. 141.

[1501] _Anthol. Pal._ VII. 507.

[1502] For other examples see Lenormant, _Monographie de la voie sacrée éleusinienne_, pp. 50 f., where also the above example is quoted.

[1503] Auson. _Epitaph._ no. 33.

[1504] _Prolegomena to Study of Gk Religion_, pp. 573 ff.

[1505] _op. cit._ p. 586; Kaibel, _C.I.G.I.S._, 641.

[1506] See above, p. 586.

[1507] See above, p. 586.

[1508] See above, p. 589.

[1509] I am forced by these considerations to dissent from Miss Harrison’s view as expressed _op. cit._ p. 594, ‘Here the symbolism seems to be of birth rather than of marriage,’ and again ‘this rite of birth or adoption ...’: and indeed this view seems hardly to tally with that which she suggests later (p. 600), “Burial itself may well have been to them (the Pythagoreans) as to Antigone a mystic marriage: ‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’”

[1510] Furtwängler, _Die Idee des Todes_, p. 293.

[1511] See above, p. 585.

[1512] Plutarch, _Sympos._ IV. 5. 3.

[1513] Aristoph. _Aves_, 1737.

[1514] Cf. Schol. _ad Aristoph._ _l. c._

[1515] This, I am aware, is not an unique case. Plato applies the same epithet to the gods as a whole, but above all to Eros, clearly, I think, with something of the same significance. See Plato, _Sympos._ § 21, p. 195 A.

[1516] Cf. Theo Smyrnaeus, _Math._ I. 18; Aristid. _Eleusin._ p. 415; Plato, _Phaedrus_, p. 48.

[1517] Lenormant, _Monographie de la voie sacrée éleusinienne_, p. 54.

[1518] _l. c._

[1519] For a long list of such monuments dealing with the story of Persephone, see Clarac, _Musée de Sculpt. anc. at mod._--‘Bas-reliefs Grecs et Romains,’ pp. 209-10.

[1520] _Monographie de la voie sacrée éleusinienne_, p. 56.

[1521] Aristoph. _Aves_, 1737.

[1522] Soph. _Antig._ 787 ff.

[1523] Pind. _Nem._ VI. _init._

[1524] Plato, _Phaedo_, cap. 32, p. 82 B, C.

[1525] See Geddes’ notes _ad loc._

[1526] For other evidence confirming this view, see Geddes’ notes _ad loc._

[1527] Plutarch, _de defect. orac._ cap. 10, p. 415.

[1528] Plato, _Symp._ § 7, p. 180.

[1529] _ibid._ § 15, p. 188.

[1530] _ibid._ § 19, p. 193.

GENERAL INDEX

Ablutions, at weddings and at funerals, 555

Aborigines, regarded as wizards, 248; their relations with invaders, 244

Absolution, and dissolution, 401; of the dead, 396 ff.

Achaeans, religion of, 521 f.

Adonis, story of, 582; story of, how interpreted, 580; as type of the initiated, 582

Aeschylus, popular beliefs utilised by, 437 ff., 459 f.; religious sympathies of, 523

Aetolus, story of, 273

Agamemnon, as _revenant_, 438

Alastor, application of word, 465 ff.; as proper name (in Homer), 473; as term of abuse, 477; derivation of word, 471; development of meaning of word, 475 f.; meaning of, 476; original meaning of, 472

Alastores, 462 ff.; not originally deities, 467 ff.

Allatius, on _vrykolakes_, 364 ff.

Amorgos, oracle of, 332

Amulets, 12-13, 21, 140

Amymone, story of, 593

Ancient language, attempted revival of, 30

Angels, exorcism of, 68; good and bad, 288; worship of, 42

Animals, unlucky species of, 307

Anointing, of the dead, 557

Anthropomorphic conception of God, 52

Antigone, as ‘bride of Acheron,’ 551

Antiphon, on blood-guilt, 443

Aphrodite, 117-120; ‘eldest of the Fates,’ 120; mystic rites of, 580

Apis, story of, 459

Apollonius of Tyana, 257

Apostasy, 409

Apple, symbolic usage of, 558

‘Arabs’ (a class of demons), 211, 276 f.; identified with _vrykolakes_ (q.v.), 277

Ariadne, story of, how represented on sepulchral monuments, 598

Aristomenes, 76

Arrogance of Greeks, 29

Art, in relation to religion, 1

Artemidorus, on death and marriage, 553 ff.

Artemis, 163-171; as huntress, 165; as the Moon, 165; bathing of, 164-5; displaced by S. Artemidos, 44; modern character of, 169; offerings to, 170

Asclepius, in serpent-form, 274 f.; re-incarnation of, in mock-mysteries, 589

Ass-centaurs, 235 and 237 f.

Athene, and the owl, 207; succeeded by Virgin Mary, 45

Athenians, religious sympathies of, 523

Attis, 586

Augury (_see_ Auspices)

August, certain days sacred to Nymphs, 152

Auspices, 308 ff.; affected by number, 313; from any movement of birds, 311; from cry of birds, 311; from flight of birds, 311; from posture of birds, 311; modified by position of observer, 312

Avengers, dead persons as, 438

Avengers of Blood, ancient names for, 462 ff.; their resemblance to modern _vrykolakes_, 458

Axe, double-headed, as religious symbol, 72

‘Baboutzicarios,’ 217

Bacchic rites, 38

Baptism, exorcisms at, 15; neglect of, 409

Beast-dances, 224 ff.

Bed-chambers, in temples, 587

Beehive tombs, original use of, 94

Bells, worn at popular festivals, 224 ff.

‘Binding’ and ‘loosing,’ 397

Binding-spells, 19; means of loosing, 19

Birds, as messengers, in modern ballads, 316 f.; as messengers of particular gods, 309; colloquial application of word, 315; in popular ballads, 315; still acknowledged as messengers of heaven, 315; which classes observed for auspices (q.v.), 308 f.; why selected for divination, 308

Black-handled knife, as charm, 286

Blessing the waters, 197

Blood-guilt, ancient conception of, 451; Attic law concerning, 443; penalties for, 453; Plato’s legislation concerning, 444

Blue beads, as amulets, 12

Body and soul, relation of, 361 ff., 526 ff.; re-union of, 538

Bones of the dead, how treated after exhumation, 540 f.

Boreas, 52

Breast-bone of fowl, divination from, 327

Bridal customs (_see_ Wedding, Marriage)

‘Bridge of Arta,’ The, 262 f.

_Brumalia_ (in Greece), 221

Burial (_see also_ Cremation, Inhumation); demanded by ghosts, 431; lack of, 407 f., 427, 449; lack of, as punishment, 457

Buzzing in ear, as omen, 329

Callicantzari, 190-255; afraid of fire, 202; beast-like elements in, 203; compared with Centaurs, 253; demons or men?, 207-211; description of, 191; description of smaller species of, 193; development of superstition concerning, 254; dialectic forms of name, 211 ff.; footgear of, 221; general habits of, 194; how outwitted, 196-200; identified with Centaurs, 235; identified with were-wolves, 208; offerings to, 201, 232; originally anthropomorphic, 206; origin of name, 211 ff.; power of transformation possessed by, 204, 240; precautions against, 200-202; resembling Satyrs and Centaurs, 192; sources of their features and attributes, 237 ff.; stories concerning, 196-200; their activity limited to Christmastide, 221; their relation to Satyrs, etc., 229 ff.; two main classes of, 191; variously represented, 190; whether demons or men originally, 209 ff.; wives of, 200

Callicantzaros, The Great, 195

Callirrhoë, as sacred spring, 555

Candles, thrown into grave at funeral, 512

‘Captain Thirteen,’ a folk-story, 75

Carnival, celebrations of, 224 ff.

Cat, jumping over dead person, 410; omens drawn from, 328

Caves, haunted by Nymphs, 160

Cenotaphs, 490

Centauros, son of Ixion, 242

Centaurs (_see_ Callicantzari), 190-255; and Lapithae, 242; as wizards, 248 f.; compared with Callicantzari, 253; general character of, 246; Heracles’ fight with, 253; how represented in Art, 247; in Hesiod, 242; in Homer, 243; in Pindar, 241; popular conception of, how affected by Art, 252; Prof. Ridgeway’s view of, 244 ff.; various species of, 235, 237; whether human or divine in origin, 241 ff.; why called ‘Beasts,’ 245 ff.

Cephalus, 601

Cerberus, 97, 99

Character of modern Greeks, 28 ff.

Charms, 286

Charon, 98-117; addressed as ‘Saint,’ 53; ancient literary presentation of, 106; as ferryman, earliest mention of, 114; brother to Uranos, 116; identified with Death, 114

Charon’s obol, 108, 285; as charm to prevent soul from re-entering body, 434; custom of, how interpreted, 405 f.

Charos, appearance of, 100; as agent of God, 101-4; as archer, 105; as ferryman, 107; as godfather, story of, 102; as horseman, 105; as pirate, 107-8; as warrior, 105; as wrestler, 104, 105; Christianised character of, 101; coin as fee for, 109; functions of, 101; household of, 99; in connexion with Christianity, 101; originally Pelasgian deity, 116; pagan character of, 105

Charun, Etruscan god, 116

Child-birth, precautions against Nereids observed at, 140; precautions at, 10-11

Children, conceived or born on Church-festivals, how afflicted, 408; liable to lycanthropy, 208; preyed upon by Gelloudes, 177; preyed upon by Striges, 181; stricken by Nereids, how treated, 145; suspected of lycanthropy, how treated, 210

Chiron, 241 ff., 248; as magician and prophet, 248 f.

Cholera, personified, 22

Christ, accepted as new deity by pagans, 41

‘Christian,’ popular usage of word, 66

Christianity, became polytheistic, 42; and paganism, 36

Church, influenced by paganism, 572 f.

Churching of women, 20

Clement of Alexandria, on the Mysteries, 570, 572; on rites of Aphrodite, 581

Clytemnestra, ghost of, 474

Cock, as victim, 326

Cocks, superstitions concerning, 195

Coin, as charm, 111; placed in mouth of dead persons, 108, 405; placed in mouth of dead persons, various substitutes for, 112

‘Comforting,’ feast of, 533

Common origin of gods and men, 65

Communion with gods, philosophers’ views of, 296

Conquering and conquered races, relations of, 244

Conservatism, religious, 95, 295, 337

‘Constantine and Areté’ (ballad), 391 f.

Continuity of Greek life and thought, 552

Convention, literary, 429

Corpse, re-animation of, 112 (_see_ Re-animation, Resuscitation)

Corycian cave, 161

Courage of Greeks, 28

Cremation (_see also_ Funeral-rites), 485 ff.; ceremonial, 496, 512; ceremonial substitute for, 491; Christian attitude towards, 501; combined with inhumation, 494; disuse of, 501 f.; for disposing of _revenants_ in Ancient Greece, 416; for disposing of _vrykolakes_, 411; in theory preferable to inhumation, 488 f.; in recent times, 503; introduced by Achaeans, 491; motives for, 502 f.; preferred to inhumation, 500 f.; revival of, 502; serving same religious end as inhumation, 491 ff.

Crockery broken at funerals, 520

Crow, 309; exception to ordinary rules of divination, 310

Curses, 387 ff., 409; diagnosed by their effects, 396; executed by demonic agents, 448; fixity of, 417; in Euripides, 418; in Sophocles, 419; operation of, 447; parental, 391 ff.; revoking of, 388 f.

Custom-dues, for passage of soul to other world, 285

Customs-officers, celestial, 284

Cybele, rites of, 586

Daemons, Plutarch’s theory of, 583 f.

Danaids, as types of unmarried women, 592

Dances, 34

Dead, messages to the, 345; worship of the, 529 note 1

Dead persons, as messengers to the other world, 344 ff.; what kinds of food presented to, 533 f.

Deadly sins, 425 ff.

Death, as penalty for bloodguilt, 455; conceived as a form of marriage, by Sophocles, 549 ff.; conceived as a form of marriage, in modern dirges, 546 ff.; conceived as a wedding with Persephone, 595; how personified in the _Alcestis_, 115; in correlation with marriage, 553; represented as a wedding on sepulchral monuments, 597 f.; sudden or violent, 408, 427

Death-struggle, 288, 289; how eased, 389

Decomposition (_see_ Dissolution)

Degeneracy of mankind, 294

Deities, gregarious or solitary, 70; non-Christian, how denoted, 67; pagan, local names for, 69

‘Delivering unto Satan,’ 406

Demeter (_see also_ Mysteries of Demeter), 79-98; and Poseidon, modern story of, 86; as corn-goddess, 562; character of, 92; Cretan legend of, 579; displaced by S. Demetrius, 44; dwelling-place of, 92; evidence for identity of, 92; her priestesses officiating at weddings, 590; horse-headed, 87, 252; in Homer, 522; in modern story, 54; modern functions of, 93; modern titles of, 89; modern worship of her statue, 80; mysteries of (_see_ Mysteries); represented by S. Demetrius, 79; stories of her union with men, 579 f.; story of, compared with story of Christ, 576; where originally domiciled, 93-96

Demeter and Persephone, modern legend of, 80; symbolism of myth concerning, 88; unity of, 88

Demetrius Poliorcetes, story of, 587

Demons, exorcism of, 68

Despoina, 579; marriage with, 596

Deucalion, 93

Devils, entering bodies of dead men, 416; exorcism of, 68

Devil, responsible for resuscitation of dead persons, 402

‘Diana,’ 164

Dionysus, and Prosymnus, story of, 585; displaced by S. Dionysius, 43; festivals of, 228-230; identified with Adonis, 599; identified with Hades, 585, 599; in scenes on sepulchral monuments, 598 f.; marriage of the ‘queen’ with, 583; mystic rites of, 582

Dioscuri, 286

Dipylon-cemetery, excavations in, 494

Dirges, 347; character of modern, 549; examples of modern, 546 ff.; purpose of, 519, 549

Diseases, caused by demons, 22

Dishonesty of Greeks, 31

Disintegration (_see_ Dissolution)

Dissolution, and absolution, 401; best secured by cremation, 502; desire for, a feature of Pelasgian religion, 524; distinguished from annihilation, 525, 538; summary of ancient views concerning, 526; time required for, 486 ff.; why desired, 515 ff.

Divination, at weddings, 326; by chance words, 303 ff.; by lot, 303; by sacrifice, 264, 318; ‘domestic,’ 327; from birds (_see also_ Auspices), 308 ff.; from breast-bone of fowl, 327; from chance words, in antiquity, 305; from demeanour of victim, 326; from eggs, 331; from involuntary movements of limbs, etc., 329; from meetings on the road, 306; from pig’s spleen, 325; from sheep’s shoulder-blade, 321 ff.; from sieves, 331; from water, 332 f.; methods of, compared, 298; suggested divisions of, 298; various branches of, 298

Dog howling at night, significance of, 328

Dogs, 32

Donkey, ill-omened, 307

Dragons, as guardians of buried treasure, 281; in folk-story, 82; popular conception of, 280; story of, 281 f.

Drama, primitive, 224-6; restrictions of, 429; rudiments of, 35

Dreams, 300 ff.; deliberately induced, 303; ecclesiastical use of, 301

Dress, at weddings and at funerals, 557

‘Drumlike’ (as description of dead bodies) (_see_ τυμπανιαῖος), 370

Drunkenness, when permissible, 303, 533

Dryads, 151

Eagle, 309

Easter, 575 f.; celebration of, 572 ff.

Ecstasy, in ancient religion, 37; religious, 294 f., 576

Eleusinian mysteries (_see_ Mysteries of Demeter)

Eleusis, excavations in cemetery at, 495

Empusa, 174, 175

Entrails, inspection of victim’s, 320, 325

Ephialtes, 21 (note 2)

Epiphany, observance of, 197; superstitions concerning, 221

Equality of men and gods, 604

Erinyes (_see_ Furies)

Eros, 118-120

‘Eternal drunkenness,’ 39

Ethical influence of Christianity, 39

Eudaemonia, as goddess, 602

Eumaeus, reception of Odysseus by, 32

Euphemistic names for deities, 69, 70

Euripides, popular form of imprecation utilised by, 418

Evil Eye, amulets against, 13; animals affected by, 11-12; cures for maladies caused by, 14; effects of, 10; inanimate things affected by, 12; in Greece, 9-15; means of averting, 14; persons affected by, 11; to whom attributed, 9-10; widespread belief in, 8

Excommunication (_see also_ ‘binding’ _and_ ‘loosing’), 401; causing non-dissolution, instances of, 398 ff.; effects of, 386, 396 ff.; origin of, 406; pagan influence on doctrine of, 401 f.

Execration (_see_ Curses, Imprecations)

Exhumation, 540; at end of three years, 487

Exile, as punishment of homicide, 445, 455

Exorcism, by witch, 14-15

‘Fair Lady of the Mountains,’ 166

Faith-cures, 60, 62

Fallmerayer, 25

Fasts, strictly observed, 574

Fate, 289

Fates, the, 120-130; appearance of, 124; at birth of Athena, 130; character of, 125; distribution of functions among, 127; functions of, 124, 127; inexorability of, 122; invocations of, 122, 128; number of, 124; offerings to, 120, 121, 125; prayer to, 123; seen or heard, 125-6; the lesser, 127-8; visits of, 125; wrath of, 126

Festival-dress, as heirloom from mother to daughter, 537

Festivals, popular, 34, 35; survival of pagan, 221 ff.

Fire, kept burning at grave-side, 507 ff.; omens drawn from, 328

Fishing-net, as prophylactic, 21

Five, ominous number, 307 (note 1)

Flood, modern traditions of the, 93

Folklore, antiquity of, 8; as clue to ancient religion, 7; laws of, 8

Folk-stories and ancient myths, relation of, 76

Foreign cults naturalised in Greece, 580

Forestry, superstitions relating to, 158

Fortieth day after death, customs and beliefs concerning, 486 ff.

Foundation-stone, ceremonial of laying, 264

Funeral-customs, 345 ff., 496 ff.; assimilated to marriage-customs, 560; compared with marriage-customs, 554 ff.; in relation to the Mysteries, 593 f.

Funeral-feasts (_see also_ Memorial Feasts), 532 f.

Funeral-meats, 533 f., 535 f.

Funeral-rites, Christian and pagan contrasted, 501; Homeric, 492; in Dipylon-period, 494; Mycenaean, 493; purpose of, 485 ff.; why necessary for due dissolution of body, 490

Funerals, Solon’s regulations concerning, 346 ff.

Funeral-usage, summary of conclusions concerning, 513 f.

Furies, as agents of Clytemnestra, 448; as personified Curses, 448; in Homer, 522; origin of Aeschylus’ conception of, 460 f.

Furtwängler, on death conceived as wedding, 597

Future life, Achaean conception of, 521 f.; conceived in general as resembling life of gods, 525; Homeric conception of, 516 ff.; material character of, 524; modern conceptions of, 518 f.; Pindaric conception of, 518

Garlands, at weddings and at funerals, 557 f.

Garlic, as prophylactic, 140

‘Garlic in your eyes,’ 14

Gello, 71; by-names of, 179; story of, 177

Gelloudes, 176-9, 211;

## activities of, 179;

cure for injuries inflicted by, 179

Genii, 255-291; confused with victims offered to them, 267, 271 ff., 276 f.; definition of, 256; how related to the place or object which they inhabit, 259; in form of bulls, 261 f., 277; in form of dragons, 262, 280; in form of snakes, 258, 259, 272 f.; in Homer, 269; in human shape, 275; mating with Lamiae, 276; of air, 283 ff.; of bridges, 262; of buildings, 259-275; of churches, 261; of houses, 259; of human beings, 287 ff.; of mountains and caves, etc., 280 ff.; of water, 275 ff.; offerings to, 260, 274; sacrifice to, 262 ff.; sacrifice to, in Ancient Greece, 269 ff.

Gennadius, story of, 399

Getae, human sacrifice among the, 350

Ghosts, asking for burial of body, 431; conventionally substituted for _revenants_ in ancient literature, 429; haunting neighbourhood of tombs, 430 f., 433; in ancient literature, 427; a modern Greek notions concerning, 428

Giants, story of, 73

Gifts to the dead, 493, 528 ff.; how regarded by the Church, 531 f.; in form of clothing, 536 f.; in form of drink, 536; in form of food, 533 ff.; in modern Greece, 532; in the classical-period, 530 f.; in the Dipylon-period, 530; in the Homeric Age, 529; in the Mycenaean Age, 529; motive for, 531, 537; on what days presented, 530 f.; until what date continued, 539 f.

Goat-skins, worn at certain popular festivals, 223 ff.

God, as controller of weather, in popular phrases, 51; modern applications of word, 48

‘God of Crete,’ 74

Godhead, ancient view of, 65; attainable by men, 604 f.

Gods, character of Greek, 526; Greek conception of, 292 f.

Good Friday, 572 ff., 574 f.

Gorgons, 184-190; and Scylla, 188; appearance of, 184; as deities of the sea, 188; character of, 185; compared with Sirens, 187; depravity of, 185-6

Gorgon, meaning of the word, 186

Goshawk, 311

Guardian-angels, 288

Guardian-spirits, in ancient Greece, 290

Hades, 97; house of, how conceived by Homer, 517; modern presentment of, 518, 549

Hair, as source of strength, 76; cf. 83

Hare, unlucky to meet, 307

Hawks, 309

Headache, magical cure of, 22

Healing, miraculous, 60, 302

Hebrew religion, contrasted with Greek, 3

Helena, 286

Helios, displaced by S. Elias, 44

Hemlock, 578

Hera, as type of women, 591; cults of, 591; wedding of, 599

Heracles, 469

Hermes Agoraeus, oracle of, 305

Hermes, as escorter of the dead, 544; succeeded by S. Michael, 45

Heroes, in form of serpents, 273

Heron, 309

Hesiodic Ages of mankind, 294

Hesperides, 282

Hiccough, as omen, 330

Hippolytus, oath of, 418

Holy Ghost, rarely named by peasants, 51

Holy Week, 572 ff.

Homicide, Delphic tradition concerning, 444, 480; Plato’s legislation concerning, 451

Honey-cakes, as diet of _genii_, 274

Honey, as food for the dead, 533; chief offering to Nymphs, 150; offered to the Fates, 121

Hospitality of Greeks, 31

Human sacrifice, 262 ff., 273, 276; a modern conception of, 341 ff.; as means of sending a wife to some god, 583; long-continued in Ancient Greece, 343; modern story of, 339, 436; substitute for, 583

Humour, popular sense of, 69

Hylas, modern parallel to story of, 161

Hymenaeus, legend of, 552

Iasion, as type of the initiated, 579

Icarus, 76

Icons, 301

Idolatry, popular inclination towards, 59

Image, magical treatment of, 16

Immorality of ancient deities, 39

Immortal fruit, 281 f.; waters, 281

Immortality, doctrine of, 350 f.

Imprecations (_see also_ Curses), 387 ff.

Incantation, against whirlwinds, 150

Incorruptibility (_see also_ Vrykolakes), 384; ancient imprecations of, 417 ff.; Apollo’s threat of, 421; as punishment of blood-guilt, 456; ecclesiastical view concerning, 396

Inhumation (_see also_ Funeral-rites), 485 ff.; ceremonial substitutes for, 489 f.; combined with cremation, 494; serving same religious end as cremation, 491 ff.; the Pelasgian rite, 491

Initiated, future happiness of the, 563 f.; hopes of the, 578 f.

Ino, parallel to story of, 138

Insanity, popular view of, 299

Inspiration, 299

Interment (_see_ Inhumation)

Intoxication, when permitted, 303, 533

Iphigenia, sacrifice of, 270

Iron, as prophylactic, 140

Islands of the Blest, 520

Itching of hand or foot, as omen, 330

Ixion, 242

Kalándae (festival of the Kalends of January), 221

Ker, 289 f.

Key laid on breast of corpse, 109, 112

Knife, black-handled, as charm, 20, 172

Kore (_see also_ Persephone); as representative of the initiated, 578; story of, how represented on sepulchral monuments, 597 f.

Laceration of checks, etc., at funerals, 346

Lamentation, at funerals, 347

‘Lame Demon,’ The, 195

Lamia, ancient conception of, 175; of the Sea, 171; responsible for water-spouts, 172

Lamiae, 174-6; character of, 174; mated with _genii_, 276

Lamp, in Prytaneum, 513; ‘The Unsleeping,’ 508; thrown into grave at funeral, 512; why placed in graves, 505 f.

Language, as evidence of tradition, 35

Law governing evolution of Greek folklore, 206

Leaven, damaged by Evil Eye, 12

Left hand, unlucky, 312

Left to right, lucky direction, 312

Lenormant, on death conceived as a wedding, 601

Leprosy, penalty for eating pig’s flesh, 87; why named by Aeschylus among penalties of blood-guilt, 453 f.

Lightning, as instrument of God’s vengeance, 73; persons and objects struck by, 73

Literature, in relation to religion, 2

‘Loosing,’ 397; equivalent to both ‘absolution’ and ‘dissolution,’ 401

Love, as the bond of feeling between men and deities, 603; in relation to the doctrine of the Mysteries, 606

Love-charms, 18

Lucian, on offerings to gods, 335

Lycaean Zeus, 352

Lycanthropy, 208, 239 f.; in children, 380; infants liable to, 183

Lying-in-state, 497

Madness, 299; among penalties of blood-guilt, 454

Magic, 15-25; sympathetic, 16, 521

Maniotes, the, 441

Mankind, of same race as gods, 65, 604

Marriage and death, correlation of, 533

Marriage, arranged by Athenians between Athene and Demetrius Poliorcetes, 587 f.; as ‘initiation,’ 590; association of the Mysteries with, 590 f.; binding-spells to prevent consummation of, 19; mimetic, as culminating point of Mysteries, 589; mimetic, enacted in many cults, 577-587; of men with deities, 545 ff.; of men with deities, as a religious doctrine, 560 f.; of men with deities, as mystic doctrine (summary), 602 f.; the Sacred (ἱερὸς γάμος), 591

Marriage-customs, compared with funeral-customs, 554 ff.; transferred to the funeral-rite, 560

Masks worn at popular festivals, 222 ff.

Matrimonial prospects, divination concerning, 303

Meat, excluded from funeral-repasts, 532

Medea, 463, 468

Medicine, popular, 21

Megrim, cure of, 23

Memorial-feasts, 486 ff.; dates of, 534; real purpose of, 534 f.; significance of the dates of, 539

Men elevated to rank of daemons, 211

Messages to the dead, 344 ff.

Metamorphosis (_see_ Transformation)

Metempsychosis, Plato’s theory of, 604 f.

Miastor, application of word, 463 f.; meaning of, 477 ff.; original meaning of word, 465

Miastores, 462 ff.

Midday, dangers of, 79

Miracles, expected by common-folk, 59; genuine, 60; sham, 60

Mirrors, superstition concerning, 10

‘Mistress, The,’ 89; marriage of, 97

‘Mistress of the Earth and of the Sea,’ 54, 91, 579

Monotheism, compared with polytheism, 40; no popular tendency towards, 3

Morality, little connected with ancient religion, 37

Mormo, 175

Mountain-nymphs, 148

Mourners, conduct of, 347; professional, 347

Mouse, omens drawn from, 328

Mouth, as exit of soul, 111

Mummers, at Christmastime and at Carnival, 223 ff.; representing Callicantzari, 227

Mumming, a survival of Dionysiac festivals, 229 ff.

Murder of kinsman, 425; legal punishment for, 457

Murdered men as avengers (_see_ Avengers, _Revenants_)

Murdered persons, avenging their own wrongs, 437 ff.; bodily activity of, 438; future lot of, 434 f.; mutilation of, 435; personal activity of, 440 ff.; returning in bodily form, 438

Murderers, future punishment of, 434 ff.; penalties incurred by, 453 ff.

Mutilation of murdered persons, 435

Mysteries, alleged impurity of, 569 f.; allusions to, in Tragedy, 550; associated with funerals, 594 f.; associated with wedding-rites, 590 f.; benefits secured by participation in, 38; Christian attitude towards, 569; containing no doctrine alien to popular religion, 567; grades of initiation in, 566; main doctrines of the, 569; openly performed in Crete, 568; of Aphrodite, 581 f.; of Cybele, 586; of Demeter, (_see below_ Mysteries of Demeter); of Dionysus, 582; parodied by the false prophet Alexander, 588 f.; Sabazian, 585; summary of doctrines taught by, 589 f.; summary of argument concerning, 602 f.; their doctrines kept secret, 567; their promises summarised by Theo Smyrnaeus, 566

Mysteries of Demeter, Achaeans excluded from, 567 f.; ancient references to, 563 f.; Christian attitude towards, 578; compared with modern celebration of Holy Week and Easter, 572 ff.; dramatic nature of, 577; their effect on spectators, 576; held in great veneration, 562 f.; how understood by participants, 578 f.; Pelasgian in origin, 567; safeguards of morality in, 577 f.; specific charge of impurity against, 577; test of linguistic purity imposed at Eleusis, 568; their kinship with Christian beliefs, 576; their promises based on ideas of popular religion, 565; their promises summarised, 565

Naiads, 159

‘Nailing,’ magical rite, 17

Nationality, 27

Nereids (_see also_ Nymphs, Sea-nymphs, Mountain-nymphs, Tree-nymphs, and Water-nymphs), 130 ff.; animals susceptible to influence of, 135; appearances of, 131; bride-like appearance of, 133; by-names of, 132; called ‘she-devils,’ 149; children carried off by, 150; confusion of different species, 153; consorts of, 149; cruelty of, 139; cures for mischief done by, 145; depart at cock-crow, 137; description of, 132-4; domestic accomplishments of, 133; dress of, 133; famed for skill in spinning, 134; festival of, 153; forms of name, 130 (note 3); general precautions against, 144; in old signification, 146; inconstancy of, 135, 138; longevity of, 156; magical kerchief of, 136; male, 149; means of protection against, 140; not immortal, 156; offerings to, 140, 150; responsible for whirlwinds, 150; ‘seizure’ by, 142; story of wedding-procession of, 149; supernatural qualities in dress of, 136; theft of children by, 141; their love of children, 140; their marriage with men, 134; their relations with men, 134-9; their relations with women, 139; transformation of, 137; widespread belief in, 131; with feet of goat or ass, 133

Nether world (_see_ Under-world)

_Nomocanon de excommunicatis_, 397

_Nomocanon_ concerning _vrykolakes_, 365, 402 f.

Non-dissolution (_see also_ Vrykolakes), 366; ancient imprecations of, 417 ff.

Numbers, lucky and unlucky, 313

Nymphs (_see also_ Nereids), 130 ff.; not immortal, 156; punishment for violence done to, 584; seizure by, 142

Oedipus, curse pronounced by, 419

Offerings, how affected by Christianity, 337; to Artemis, 170; to Callicantzari, 201; to _genii_, 274; to gods, motive of, 335, 336 f.; to Nereids, 140; to Saints, 58, 337; to the dead (_see_ Gifts), 493

Oil, spilling of, as omen, 328

Olive, foliage or wood used in funerals, 498 f.

Olympus, as abode of the Fates, 128

Omens (_see_ Divination); from dripping of water, 121

Oracle of Amorgos, 332

Oracles, 305, 331 ff.

Orchestra, 35

Oreads, 148

Orestes, how spurred on to vengeance, 441 f.; with what penalties threatened by Apollo, 421

Orithyia, 601

Orphics, 38

Orphic tablets, 595 f.

Owl-faced Athene, 207

Owls, 309, 310, 311

‘Ox-headed man,’ The, (popular story), 278

Pagan customs, inveteracy of, 46; deities, how denoted, 67

Palmistry, 329

Pan, 77-9

Panagia, portraits of, 301

Paradise, popular conception of, 519

Parga, evacuation of, 503

Parthenon, Christian use of, 45; figures in east pediment of, 130

Patriotism of Greeks, 28

Patroclus, funeral of, 348 f., 529

Patroclus’ ghost, 429; why desirous of burial, 516

Pausanias, on human sacrifice, 353

Pedantry of Greeks, 30

Pelasgians, religion of, 522 f.

Peleus (_see_ Thetis)

Pentacle, 113, 406

_Perpería_, 24

Persephone (_see also_ Kore, Demeter); ‘bridal-chamber’ of, 595

_Pharmakos_, 355 ff.

Pheneos, Lake, 85

‘_Pheres_,’ 243

Philinnion, story of, 413, 433

Phlegon, story of _revenant_ narrated by, 412 ff.

Phlya, mystic rites at, 587

Physique of Modern Greeks, 26, 27

Pig’s flesh, taboo, 87; spleen, used for divination, 325

Plague, personified, 22; personified as trio of female demons, 124

Pollution, 425; ancient conception of, 451; of bloodguilt, 445

Polydorus, ghost of, 429

Polynices, doom of, 420

Polytheism, compared with monotheism, 40; merits of, 292; modern, 47, 48; popular bent towards, 54

Pomegranate, symbolic usage of, 558 ff.

Poseidon, 75-77; as healer, 46

‘Possession,’ by angels or devils, 68; by devils, 144; by the devil, as punishment, 406

Poultry, divination from, 312

Prayer, usually accompanied by offerings, 335

Predestination, 122

Priest, unlucky to meet, 306

Prometheus, legend of, 74

Prometheus’ prophecy of Zeus’ downfall, 552

Prytaneum of Athens, shape of, 96

Psellus, on divination, 321, 324

_Pulcra montium_, 167

Punishment after death, 419 ff.

Purification, from bloodguilt, 451, 483; means of, 357

Purity, confusion of physical and moral, 37

Pythagoras and Zalmoxis, 351

‘Queen of the Mountains,’ The, 163

‘Queen of the Shore,’ The, 163

Quince, symbolic usage of, 558 f.

Rail (_ornith._), 309

Rain-charm, 23

Rain-making, 49

Ram, as victim, 326

Rat, unlucky to meet, 307

Raven, 309

Re-animation (_see also_ Resuscitation, _Vrykolakes_), 384; of corpses left unburied, 449; of dead body by the soul, 432 ff.

Religion, Achaean and Pelasgian elements in, 522 f.; character of Greek, 2, 294, 361 f., 545; complexity of Greek, 4

Religious feeling, dominance of, 5-7; literature, absence of, 2-5

Resuscitation (_see also_ Re-animation, _Vrykolakes_), 388; of dead persons, how viewed by the Church, 402 ff.; of dead persons, summary of Hellenic belief concerning, 434

Retribution, doctrine of future, 523; exactitude of, 453 ff.; law of, 435

_Revenants_ (_see also Vrykolakes_); ancient names for, 462 ff.; ancient Greek instances of, 412 ff.; as Avengers of blood, 434 ff.; as Avengers of blood, summary of ancient belief concerning, 461; as Avengers of blood, their traits transferred to the Furies, 460; called up by sorcerers, 404; contrasted with ghosts, 427; different species of, 384; distinguished from ghosts, 416; exacting their own vengeance, in ancient literature, 438; Greek conception of, 394; harmless type of, 394 f.; Hellenic conception of, 412; in ancient literature, 430, 438 f.

Rhapsodes, 34

Richard, le Père, on _vrykolakes_, 367

Ridgeway, on cremation and inhumation, 491

Right hand, lucky, 312

‘Riotings,’ The, 226

River-gods, 277, 280

Rohde, on cremation, 492

_rosalia_, 45

Sabazian mysteries, 585

Sabazius, in form of snake, 586

Sacrifice (_see also_ Human Sacrifice), 335 ff.; at launching of ship, 266; at laying foundation-stone, 264; at opening of quarry, 265; at weddings, 326; human, 262 ff.; to _genii_, 276; to _genii_, Slavonic influence upon, 268

Sacrifices, classification of, 338

Sacrificial omens, 319

Saints, functions of, 55; functions suggested by names of, 56; offerings made to, 58; sometimes reputed immoral or malign, 56; substituted for ancient gods, 43; with titles denoting locality, function, etc., 55; worship of, 42

S. Artemidos, cures children ‘struck by the Nereids,’ 44; successor to Artemis, 44

‘Saint Beautiful,’ 164

S. Catharine, 303

S. Demetra, at Eleusis, 80; Eleusinian legend of, 80

S. Demetrius, successor to Demeter, 44

S. Dionysius, successor to Dionysus, 43

S. Elias, responsible for thunder, 52; successor to Helios, 44

S. Elmo’s light, 286

S. George, displacing Theseus or Heracles, 45; legend concerning, 261

‘S. John of the Column,’ 58

S. John the Baptist, 37, 304

S. Luke, as painter, 301

S. Michael, successor to Hermes, 45

S. Nicolas, 340; patron of sailors, 287; superseding Poseidon, 75

Salt-cake, 303

Salt, dissolving of, as magical ceremony, 388 f.

Satan, delivering persons unto, 406

_Saturnalia_ (in Greece), 221

Satyrs and Centaurs, closely related, 236

Satyr-dances, 229

Scylla, replaced by modern Gorgon, 188; parentage of, 173

Scyros, faith-cure at, 62

Sea-nymphs, 146

‘Seizure,’ by Nymphs, 142

Serpents, as incarnations of heroes, 274

Shadow, as _genius_, 289

Shadow-victims, 265

‘She-devils,’ Nereids so called, 149

Sheep-dogs, 32

Shooting-stars, 286

Shoulder-blade of sheep, used for divination, 321 ff.

Sieve, employed to detain Callicantzari, 196-7

Sieves, divination from, 331

Sileni, 230

_Silicernium_, 535

Sins, deadly, 409 f., 425 ff.

Sirens, 187

Slavonic immigrations, 26; influence on belief in vampires, 376 ff.

Sleep and Death, 543

Sleeping in churches, 61

Small-pox, personified, 22

Snake, as _genius_ of Acropolis, 260; auspicious in house, 328; bearded, 274; unlucky to meet on road, 307

Snakes, as manifestations of deities, 275

Snake-form, assumed by _genii_ (_see_ Genii)

Sneezing, as omen, 330

Socrates’ familiar spirit, 291

Sophocles, popular form of imprecation utilised by, 419

Sorcery, punishment of, 409

Sosipolis, story of, 272

Souls (_see_ Ghosts)

Soul and body, relations of, 361 ff., 526 ff.; re-union of, 538

Soul-cult, Rohde’s theory of, 529, note 1

Soul, emancipation of, 515 f.; Homeric conception of, 517 f.; Socrates’ teaching concerning, 516

Spitting, to avert malign influences, 14, 307

Stars, baneful influence of, 10, 11

Stoat, unlucky to meet, 307

Striges, 179-184, 211; Italian origin of, 180; intercourse of devils with, 416; precautions against, 181; prey upon children, 181; stories concerning, 182-3

Strigla, 282

Sucking-pig, as victim, 483

Suicides, 408

Sun, relics of worship of, 44

Surrogate Victims, 355

Swallow-song, 35

Sympathetic magic, 264

Taboo, 87, 357

Taenarus, descent to Hades at, 45

Tartarus, 98

_Telonia_, 284; local usages of name, 287

Temples, as treasuries, 96; converted to churches, 45

Tenos, Church of Annunciation at, 45, 58; faith-cures at, 60; miraculous _icon_ of, 301

Thargelia, 356

‘The Beautiful One of the Earth,’ 97

‘The Great Lady,’ 163

‘The Lady Beautiful,’ 163

‘The Lamia of the Sea,’ 171

‘The Lamia of the Shore,’ 171

‘The Mistress,’ 89; marriage of, 97

Theseum, Christian use of, 45

Theseus, 469

Thesmophoria, 87

Thetis, modern parallel to story of, 137

Thracians, funeral-rites of, 500

Thread of life, 124

Three, ominous number, 307 (note 1), 487

Thunderbolt, 72

Thunder-god, 50

Timothy, Bishop of Ephesus, martyrdom of, 222

Titans, story of, 73

Titles of saints, sources of, 55

Tolerance of pagans, 42

Torches, at funerals, 505 ff.

Traditions, popular and literary, 432

Trance, 69

Transformation, magic power of, 86, 249; power of, attributed to _genii_, 276; power of, how indicated in Art, 251

Transmigration of souls, Plato’s theory of, 604 f.

Treasure, guarded by dragons, 281

Treasury of Atreus, original use of, 94

Tree, supporting the world, 155

Tree-nymphs, 151; confused with water-nymphs, 153; woodcutters’ precautions against, 158

Trees, not to be cut or peeled on certain days in August, 152

Tuesday, unlucky day, 313

Tutelary _genii_, fed on honey-cakes, 274

‘Twelve Days,’ The, 221

Twitching of eyebrow, as omen, 329

Unburied (_see_ Burial, lack of)

Under-world (_see also_ Future life); Homeric conception of, 517 f.; modern presentment of, 549

Uninitiated, future fate of the, 563 f., 592

Unmarried, funeral-rite of the, 556; future fate of the, 592

‘Unsleeping Lamp,’ The, 540

Vampires (_see Vrykolakes_); characteristics of Slavonic, 387; modern Greek conception of, 363 ff.; Slavonic treatment of, 410 f.

Vampirism, causes of, 375, 407 ff.; imprecations of, 387; instances of, 367 ff.; widespread belief in, 371 ff.

Vendetta, 440 ff.

Vengeance for blood-guilt, extended to whole communities, 459; for homicide, Delphic tradition concerning, 444 ff.

Vengeance for murder, effected by a curse, 446 f.; effected by demonic agents, 448; exacted by murdered person, 435 ff.; incumbent on next-of-kin, 440; legally incumbent on next-of-kin, 443 f.; methods of, 453 ff.

Vesta, temple of, 96

Victim, as messenger, 340 ff.; elevated to rank of _genius_, 267 ff., 276

Vintage-festival, 35

Virgin, worship of the, 51

Virginity, consecrated to river-god, 592

Virility, affected by magical spell, 19

Visualisation, peasants’ powers of, 47

Votive offerings, character of, 58

Vows, 59

_Vrykolakas_, Greek equivalents for word, 381 f.; how originally employed in Greek, 378; occasionally used in sense of ‘were-wolf,’ 379 f.; origin of word, 377; original meaning of word, 377 f.; Slavonic forms of word, 377 (note 2)

_Vrykolakes_ (_see also_ Incorruptibility, Resuscitation, _Revenants_, Vampires, Vampirism), 361 ff.; attitude of authorities towards belief in, 371 f.; belief in them not wholly Slavonic, 381; capable of sexual commerce, 415 f.; classes of persons liable to become, 375, 407 ff.; close resemblance of ancient _revenants_ to, 458; corporeal nature of, 376; cremation of, substitutes for, 488; ecclesiastical view of, 386, 396 ff.; Greek treatment of, 410 f., 502; Hellenic element in conception of, 407; how disposed of, 371 f.; lineage traced from, 416; modern Greek conception of, 363 ff.; _nomocanon_ concerning, 365, 402; not to be confused with ghosts, 376; occasional barbarities inflicted upon, 412; original Greek type of, 391 ff.; peculiar method of treating, 540; recent cases of the burning of, 374; recent Cretan account of, 372; resuscitated by the Devil, 405 f.; Slavonic influence upon conception of, 376 ff.; stories of, 368 ff.; widespread belief in, 371 ff., 374

Vultures, 309

‘Wanderers,’ 473

Washing, prohibited on certain days of August, 152

Water, immortal, 281; miraculous, 60; oracular property of, 334; pouring out of, as magic rite, 520; salt, bars passage of supernatural beings, 368 (note 1), 372; ‘speechless,’ 304, 331; spilling of, as omen, 328 supplied daily to the dead, 539;

‘Water-bearer,’ the, 556, 592 f.

Water-nymphs, 159; confused with tree-nymphs, 153; precautions against, 160

Water-pitcher (_see also_ Water-bearer), 594

Water-spout, caused by Lamia of the Sea, 52; superstitions concerning, 172

Weasel, unlucky to meet, 307; why unlucky to see, 327

Weather, chief province of God, 51

Wedding, ‘The Sacred,’ 599 f.; in Hades, The, (ballad), 548

Wedding-customs (_see_ Marriage-customs)

Wedding-dress, as funeral-garb of betrothed girls or young wives, 557

Weddings, precautions at, 13; precautions against magic at, 20; sacrifice and divination at, 326

Wedding-scenes on funeral-monuments, 597 f., 601 f.

Were-wolves, 239; and vampires, 377 f.; become vampires after death, 385

Whirlwinds, caused by nymphs, 52, 150; safeguard against, 150

Winds, personified, 52

Wine, passed from left to right, 312; spilling of, as omen, 328

Winter festivals, 221 ff.

Witch, as rain-maker in Santorini, 49

Witchcraft, male and female exponents of, 15, 16

Witches, 15

Woodpecker, 309

Wooing, how conducted, 558

Wren, 309

Zalmoxis, 350 f.

Zeus, 72-74; Lycaean, 352; Meilichios, 275; Prostropaeus, 481; survival of name, 74

INDEX OF GREEK WORDS AND PHRASES

ἀγάπη, 603

ἀγγελικά, 68

ἀγγελοθωρεῖ, 288

ἀγγελοκρούσθηκε, 289

ἀγγελομαχεῖ, 289

ἀγγελοσκιάζεται, 289

ἀγγελοφορᾶται, 289

ἁγι̯ασμός, 197

ἀγιελοῦδες, 147, 176

ἅγος, 451

ἀδερφοί μας, οἱ, 70

ἀδερφοφᾶδες, 208

ἀερικά, 68, 283

Ἀκμονίδης, 116

ἀκοίμητο καντῆλι, τὸ, 508

ἀλαίνειν, 472, 474

ἀλάομαι, 474

ἀλάστωρ (_see_ Alastor), 462 f., 465 ff.

ἀλαφροστοίχει̯ωτοι, 204, 288

ἀλιτήριοι, 482

Ἀλουστίναι, 155

ἄλυτος, 381, 397

ἀμπόδεμα, 19

ἀμφιθαλής, 600

ἀναικαθούμενος, 382

ἀναρᾳδοπαρμένος, 142

ἀνάρραχο, 381

ἀνασκελᾶδες, 205 (note 1)

ἀνεμικαίς, 150

ἀνεμογαζοῦδες, 150

ἄνθρακες ὁ θησαυρός (proverb), 281

ἀπάντημα, 306

ἀπενιαυτεῖν, 445

ἀποικίζω (in Soph. _O. C._ 1383 ff.), 419

ἀπόρρητος, 569

Ἀράπηδες, 276

ἀραχνιασμένος, 518

ἄρρητος, 569

ἀστροπελέκι, 72

ἀσώματοι, οἱ, 144

Ἀφροδίτισσα, 118

βάμπυρας, 378

βασίλιννα, 583

βασίλισσα τοῦ γιαλοῦ, ἡ, 163

βασίλισσα τῶν βουνῶν, ἡ, 163

βασκαίνω, 9

βασκανία, 9

βασκανισμοί, 14

βιστυρι̯ά, 9 (note 2)

βόμπυρας, 378

βουρκόλακας, 364

Βραχνᾶς, 21

βρυκόλακας, 364

βρυκολακιάζω, 390

Γελλοῦδες, 148, 177

γενέσια, 531

γεραραί, 583

γιαλοῦδες, 147, 176

Γιλλόβρωτα, 178

γλαυκῶπις, 207

Γοργόνες, 184

γραψίματα τῶν Μοιρῶν, 126

δᾳδουχία, 566

δαίμονας τῆς θάλασσας, ὁ, 75

δαίμονες, 569

δαίμονες )( θεοί, 41

δαιμόνια, 68

δαιμόνιον μεσημβρινόν, 79

δὲν ξέρει τὰ τρία κακὰ τῆς Μοίρας του, 127

δένω, 397

δέσιμον, 19

δέσποινα, 90

δέω, 397

Δημητρεῖοι, 579

διαβόλισσαις, 149

δράκος, δράκοντας, 280

δράσαντι παθεῖν (proverb), 435

δρύμαις, 151

δρύματα, 151

ἐγκοίμησις, 61

εἰδωλικά, 68

εἰρεσιώνη, 35

ἐλευθεροῦν, 424

ἐναγίσματα, 530, 531

ἔνατα, 531, 532

ἐνόδιοι σύμβολοι, 298

ἐξωπαρμένος, 143

ἐξωτικά, 143

ἐξωτικός, 67

ἑορτοπιάσματα, 208

ἐποπτεία, 566

ἐργασάμενος, 578

ἔρως, 603

Ἔρωτας, ὁ, 118

εὐδαίμων, 600

εὔμορφος, 439

εὐρώεις, 518

ἔχει ᾱπ’ ἔξω, 143

ζαβέται, 146

ζούμπιρα, 69

ζωντόβολα, 69

Θάνατος, personification of, 115

θεός, modern applications of word, 48

θεοφιλής, 566

θύειν, 335

θυσία, 335

θυσίαι, 530

ἱερὸς γάμος, 591

ἱεροφαντία, 566

ἱπποκένταυροι, 235

ἰσκιοπατήθηκε, 289

ἴσκιος, 289

ἴυγξ, 18

ἰχθυοκένταυροι, 235

κάηδες, 208

καθαρεύειν τῇ φωνῇ, 568

καθάρματα, 355

καϊμπίλιδες, 209

κακανθρωπίσματα, 205

κακαουσκιαίς, 153

καλαὶς ἀρχόντισσαις, ᾑ, 132

καλαὶς κυρᾶδες, to whom applied, 171

Καλή, ἡ ἅγι̯α, 164

Καλὴ τῶν ὀρέων, ἡ, 166

καλι̯οντζῆδες, 215

καλιτσάγγαρος, 220

καλκαγάροι, 213

καλκάνια, 213

καλκατζόνια, 215

καλλικαντζαρίνα, 200

καλλικάντζαρος, derivation of, 232 ff.; dialectic varieties of form of, 211 ff.; proposed derivations of, 215 ff.; table of dialectic forms of, 214

καλλικαντζαροῦ, 200

καλλικυρᾶδες, 132

Καλλισπούδηδες, 192

καλοί, οἱ, 70

καλοΐσκι̯ωτος, 289

καλοκυρᾶδες, ᾑ, 125, 132

καλορίζικοι, οἱ, 70

Κάλω, ἡ κυρά, 163

καμπουχέροι, 223, 227

κάνθαρος, 219

κανίσκια, 487

καντανικά, 69

κάντζαρος = κένταυρος, 233

κάρφωμα, 17

καταχανᾶδες (_see_ Vrykolakes), 372

καταχανᾶς, 382

καταχύσματα, 535 (note 4)

κατζαρίδες, 219

κατσικᾶδες, 193

κατσιμπουχέροι, 223, 227

καψιούρηδες, 203

Κήρ, 289

κίρκος, 311

κλεηδόνιος (epithet of Hermes), 306

κλήδονας, ὁ, 304

κληδόνες, 298

κληδών, 304

κνώδαλα, 460

κοιμητήρια, 542

κόλλυβα, 487, 535

κόλπος, 596

κόλυμβος, 129

κόπηκε ἡ κλωστή του (proverbial), 124

κόρυμβος, 129

κοσκινομαντεία, 331

κουκουβάγια, 310, 311

κουρμπάνι̯α, 322

κουτσοδαίμονας, ὁ, 207

κρυερός, 518

κρυοπαγωμένος, 518

κυρά, ἡ μεγάλη, 163

κυρὰ τοῦ κόσμου, ἡ, 89

κυρὰ τσῆ γῆς καὶ τσῆ θαλάσσης, ἡ, 54, 91

κωλοβελόνηδες, 192

λάμπασμα, λάμπαστρο, 381

λοιβαί, 530

λουτροφόρος, 556, 594

Λυκαῖος, 352

λυκάνθρωπος, 241, 384

λυκοκάντζαροι, 203, 215

λυκοκάντζαρος, 239 f.

λυόνω, 397

λύω, 397

μαζεύει γράμματα γιὰ τοὺς πεθαμμένους (proverb), 346

μαζώθηκε τὸ κουβάρι του (proverbial), 124

μακαρία, 532

μακαρίτης, 532

μακραίωνες, 156

μάνα τοῦ Ἔρωτα, ἡ, 118

μαντική, 298

μασχαλίζειν, 435 f., 442

μασχαλισμός, 359

μάτι, τὸ κακό, 9

μάτι̯αγμα, 9

ματιάζω, 9

μέγαρα, 94

μελιτοῦττα, 533

μήνιμα, 447, 449

μίασμα, 425, 451

μιάστωρ (_see_ Miastor), 462 ff.

μνημόσυνα, 487, 534

Μοῖρα, 289

Μοῖραις, 120, 122, etc.

Μόρα (or Μώρα), ἡ, 174

μυρολογήτριαις, μυρολογίστριαις, 347

μυρολόγια (_see_ Dirges)

μύσος, 451

νὰ φᾶς τὸ κεφάλι σου, 14

νεκύσια, 531

νεραϊδάλωνο, 148

Νεράϊδες, 130

Νεραΐδης, 149

νεραϊδογεννημένος, 134

νεραϊδογνέματα, 134

νεραϊδοκαμωμένος, 134

νοικοκύρης, 260

ντουπί, 370

νύμφη, 131

νυμφόληπτος, 142

νυφίτσα, 328

Νυχτοπαρωρίταις, 195

ξαφνικά, 68

ξεραμμέναις, 160

ξεφτέρι, 317 (note 1)

ξόανα, 226

ξόρκια, ξορκισμοί, 14

ξωτικά, 67, 207

ὁ βρυκόλακας ἀρχίζει ἀπὸ τὰ γένειά του (proverb), 387

ὁ διὰ κόλπου θεός, 586

οἰκοσκοπικόν, 298, 327

οἰκουροί, 260

οἰωνός, 308

ὀνοκένταυροι, 235, 237 f.

ὄρνις, 307

ὅτι γράφουν ᾑ Μοίραις, δὲν ξεγράφουν (proverbial saying), 122

παγανά, 67, 207

παλαμναῖος, 448

παλμικόν, 298, 329

πανηγύρια, 34

παππαροῦνα, 24

παρηγορία, 533

παρμένος, 142

Παρωρίταις, 195

παστάς, 96, 587

παστός, 587

πεντάγραμμον, 113

πεντάλφα, 113

περατίκι, 109, 286

περίδειπνον, 531, 532

περπερία, 24

Πεταλώτης (title of S. George), 261

πιασμένος, 142

πίζηλα, 70

Πλανήταροι, 192, 204

πλάτωμα, 148

πρόθεσις, 497

προμνήστρια, 558

προξενήτρια, 558

προστρέπω, προστρέπομαι, 479

προστροπαῖος, 462 f., 479 ff.

προτέλεια, 591

Ῥἱζικάς, ὁ, 304 (note 3)

ῥουκατζιάρια, 224, 226

ῥουσάλια, 45

σαββατογεννημένοι, 288

σαραντάρια, σαρανταρίκια, 488 (notes 1 and 2)

σαραντίζω, 20

σαρκωμένος, 382

σκαλλικάντζαρος (_see_ καλλικάντζαρος), 213

σκατζάρια, 215

σκατσάντσαροι, 215

σκηνή, 35

σκιορίσματα, 203, 205

σκόρδο ’στὰ μάτι̯α σου, 14

σμερδάκια, 69

σπλαγχνοσκοπία, 325

σπονδαί, 530

στοιχει̯ά (στοιχεῖα) (_see_ Genii); comprehensive usage of, 69

στοιχεῖα, development of meaning of, 255 ff.; τοῦ κόσμου, τὰ (St Paul), 255-6

στοιχειό, 548

στοιχειόνω, 267

στοιχειοῦν, 256

στοιχειωματικός, 256

στοιχειωμένος, 258, 382

στρίγγαι, 144

στρίγλαις (στρίγγλαις, στρῦγγαι), 180-1

στριγλοποῦλι, 180

συρτός, 34

σφάζειν, 336

σφανταχτά, 68

σώθηκε ἡ κλωστή του (proverbial), 124

ταράματα, τά, 226

ταριχευθέντα (Aesch. _Choeph._ 288), 421, 456

τέλειοι, 591

τελεύμεναι, αἱ, 590

τέλη, 553

τελώνια, comprehensive usage of, 69

τελωνιακά, 286

τῆς Λάμιας τὰ σαρώματα (proverb), 174

τόπακας, 260

τριακάδες, 531

τρίτα, 530, 532

τροῦπαις τοῦ διαβόλου, ᾑ, 85

τσίκρος, 311

τσιλικρωτά, 192

τσίνια, 68

τυμπανιαῖος, 365, 370, 381, 385 f., 400

τυμπανίτης (_see also_ τυμπανιαῖος), 400

Τύχη, 289

ὑδροφορεῖν, 593

Φανιστής, ὁ, 304 (note 3)

φαντάσματα, 68

φαρμακός, ὁ, 355

φάσκελον, τὸ, 14

φάσματα, 68

Φῆρες, 245, 250

χαμοδράκι, 281 (note 2)

χαροποῦλι, 310

Χάροντας, 97

Χάρος, 97

χαρούμενοι, οἱ, 70

Χαρώνειος, 114

Χαρωνῖται, 114

χειροσκοπικόν, 298

χελιδόνιον, meaning of, 161 (note 2)

χελιδόνισμα, 35

χοαί, 530

ψυχόπηττα, 534

ὠμοπλατοσκοπία, 321

ὠοσκοπικά, 331

ὥρα τὸν ηὗρε, 143

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Transcriber's Note

The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 58 "sanctuary in person" changed to "sanctuary in person."

p. 60 (note) footnote number inserted

p. 85 (note) "Conon, _Narrat._ 15" changed to "Conon, _Narrat._ 15."

p. 99 (note) footnote number inserted

p. 105 (note) "'sorrowful." changed to "'sorrowful.'"

p. 148 "Μέλετη κ.τ.λ." changed to "Μελέτη κ.τ.λ."

p. 151 "the honeyed ones[365].’" changed to "'the honeyed ones[365].’"

p. 360 "guarding and tending of Love’" changed to "guarding and tending of Love.’"

p. 476 (note) "cap. 15 (p. 418)" changed to "cap. 15 (p. 418)."

p. 608 "smaller species of 193" changed to "smaller species of, 193"

p. 609 "time required for" entry placed in alphabetical order

p. 616 "supplied daily to the dead" entry placed in alphabetical order

Inconsistent or archaic spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have otherwise been kept as printed.