Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/608

 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, 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, [Greek: ahi teleumenai] and [Greek: ahi epinympheuomenai], 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 '; while