Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/308

 conclusion by similar rites, in which the purpose of mystically cleansing was openly put forward. Thus Plutarch, in his essay on superstition, represents the guilty man who would be purified actually rolling in clay, confessing his misdeeds, and then sitting at home purified by the cleansing process. In another rite, the cleansing of blood-guiltiness, a similar process was practised. Orestes, after killing his mother, complains that the Eumenides do not cease to persecute him, though he has been "purified by blood of swine." Apollonius says that the red hand of the murderer was dipped in the blood of swine and then washed. Athenæus describes a similar unpleasant ceremony. The blood of whelps was apparently used also, men being first daubed with it and then washed clean. The word is again the appropriate ritual term. Such rites Plutarch calls, "filthy purifications." If daubing with dirt is known to have been a feature of Greek mysteries, it meets us everywhere among savages. In O-Kee-Pa, that curiously minute account of the Mandan mysteries, Catlin writes that a portion of the frame of the initiate was "covered with clay, which the operator took from a wooden bowl, and with his hand plastered unsparingly over." The fifty young men waiting for initiation