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 ancient cults in Greece were mystic, others open and public. An explanation often offered is that the mystic cults are the Pelasgic or pre-Hellenic and that the conquered populations desired to shroud their religious ceremonies from the profane eyes of the invaders. But we should then expect to find them administered chiefly by slaves and the lower population; on the contrary they are generally in the hands of the noblest families, and the evidence that slaves possessed in any of them the right of initiation is only slight. Nor does the explanation in other respects fit the facts at all. The deities who are worshipped with mystic rites have in most cases Hellenic names and do not all belong to the earliest stratum of Hellenic religion. Besides those of Demeter, by far the most numerous in the Hellenic world, we have record of the mysteries of Ge at Phlye in Attica, of Aglauros and the Charities at Athens, of Hecate at Aegina; a shrine of Artemis  on the road between Sparta and Arcadia points to a mystic cult of this goddess, and we can infer the existence of a similar worship of Themis. Now these are either various forms of the earth-goddess, or are related closely to her, being powers that We call “chthonian,” associated with the world below, the realm of the dead. We may surmise then that the mystic setting of a cult arose in many cases from the dread of the religious miasma which emanated from the nether world and which suggested a prior ritual of purification as necessary to safeguard the person before approaching the holy presence or handling certain holy objects. This would explain the necessity of mysteries in the worship of Dionysus also, the Cretan Zagreus, Trophonius at Lebadeia, Palaemon-Melicertes on the Isthmus of Corinth. They might also be necessary for those who desired communion with the deified ancestor or hero, and thus we hear of the mysteries of Dryops at Asine, of Antinotis the favourite of Hadrian at Mantineia. Again, where there was hope or promise that the mortal should by communion be able to attain temporarily to divinity, so hazardous an experiment would be safeguarded by special preparation, secrecy and mystic ritual; and this may have been the prime motive of the institution of the Attis-Cybele mystery. (See .)

For the student of Hellenism, the Eleusinian and Orphic ceremonies are of paramount importance; the Samothracian, which vied with these in attractiveness for the later Hellenic world, were not Hellenic in origin, nor wholly hellenized in character, and cannot be considered in an article of this compass. As regards the Eleusinia, we are in a better position for the investigation of them than our predecessors were; for the modern methods of comparative religion and anthropology have at least taught us to ask the right questions and to apply relevant hypotheses; archaeology, the study of vases, excavations on the site, yielding an ever-increasing hoard of inscriptions, have taught us much concerning the external organization of the mysteries, and have shown us the beautiful figures of the deities as they appeared to the eye or to the mental vision of the initiated.

As regards the inner content, the secret of the mystic celebration, it is in the highest degree unlikely that Greek inscriptions or art would ever reveal it; the Eleusinian scenes that appear on Attic vases of about the 5th century cannot be supposed to show us the heart of the mystery, for such sacrilegious rashness would be dangerous for the vase-painter. If we are to discover it, we must turn to the ancient literary records. These must be handled with extreme caution and a more careful scrutiny than is often applied. We must not expect full enlightenment from the Pagan writers, who convey to us indeed the poetry and the glow of this fascinating ritual, and who attest the deep and purifying influence that it exercised upon the religious temperament, but who are not likely to tell us more. It is to the Christian Fathers we must turn for more esoteric knowledge, for they would be withheld by no scruple from revealing what they knew. But we cannot always believe that they knew much, for only those who, like Clement and Arnobius, had been Pagans in their youth, could ever have been initiated. Many of them uncritically confuse in the same context and in one sweeping verdict of condemnation Orphic, Phrygian-Sabazian and Attis-Mysteries with the Eleusinian; and we ought not too lightly to infer that these were actually confused and blended at Eleusis. We must also be on our guard against supposing that when Pagan or Christian writers refer vaguely to “mysteria,” they always have the Eleusinian in their mind.

The questions that the critical analysis of all the evidence may hope to solve are mainly these: (a) What do we know or what can we infer concerning the personality of the deities to whom the Eleusinian mysteries were originally consecrated, and were new figures admitted at a later period? (b) When was the mystery taken over by Athens and opened to all Hellas, and what was the state-organization provided? (c) What was the inner significance, essential content or purport of the Eleusinia, and what was the source of their great influence on Hellas? (d) Can we attribute any ethical value to them, and did they strongly impress the popular belief in immortality? Limits of space allow us only to adumbrate the results that research on the lines of these questions has hitherto yielded.

The paramount divine personalities of the mystery were in the earliest period of which we have literary record, the mother and the daughter, Demeter and Kore, the latter being never styled Persephone in the official language of Eleusis; while the third figure, the god of the lower world known by the euphemistic names of Pluto (Plouton) and at one time Eubouleus, the ravisher and the husband, is an accessory personage, comparatively in the background. This is the conclusion naturally drawn from the Homeric hymn to Demeter, a composition of great ritualistic value, probably of the 7th century, which describes the abduction of the daughter, the sorrow and search of the mother, her sitting by the sacred well, the drinking of the  or sacred cup and the legend of the pomegranate. An ancient hymn of Pamphos, from which Pausanias freely quotes and which he regards as genuine, appears to have told much the same story in much the same way. As far as we can say, then, the mother and daughter were there in possession at the very beginning. The other pair of divinities known as  , that appear in a 5th-century inscription and on two dedicatory reliefs found at Eleusis, have been supposed to descend from an aboriginal period of Eleusinian religion when deities were nameless, and when a peaceful pair of earth-divinities, male and female, were worshipped by the rustic community, before the earth-goddess had pluralized herself as Demeter and Kore, and before the story of the madre dolorosa and the lost daughter had arisen. But for various reasons the contrary view is more probable, that  and  are later cult-titles of the married pair Pluto-Cora (Plouton-Kore), the personal names being omitted from that feeling of reverential shyness which was specially timid in regard to the sacred names of the deities of the underworld. And it is a fairly familiar phenomenon in Greek religion that two separate titles of the same divinity engender two distinct cults.

The question as to the part played by Dionysus in the Eleusinia is important. Some scholars, like M. Foucart, have supposed that he belonged from the beginning to the inner circle of the mystery; others that he forced his Way in at a somewhat later period owing to the great influence of the Orphic sects who captured the stronghold of Attic religion and engrafted the Orphic-Sabazian , the story of the incestuous union of Dionysus-Sabazius with Demeter-Kore, and of the death and rendering of Zagreus, upon the primitive Eleusinian faith. A saner and more careful criticism rejects this view. There is no genuine trace discovered as yet in the inner circle of the mysteries of any characteristically Orphic doctrine; the names of Zagreus and Phanes are nowhere heard, the legend of Zagreus and the death of Dionysus are not known, to have been mentioned there. Nor is there any print within or in the precincts of the  : the hall of the , of the footsteps of the Phrygian deities, Cybele, Attis, Sabazius.