Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/585

 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, 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