Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/583

 from care among the living, and, when thou goest where most are gone, shall make thy heart lighter .' 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.

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.