Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/610

 the sacred marriage, enacted before the now wedded pair, was the full revelation. Again these preliminaries always included the solemn ablution 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 .' Finally the first night on which the wedded pair came together was known as the 'mystic night' ([Greek: nyx mystikê]), 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, 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. 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.]Epist. 10, p. 680.]