III. HARVEST FESTIVALS…

III. HARVEST FESTIVALS

THE THARGELIA, KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.

‘λοιδορούμενοι εὐλογοῦμεν, διωκόμενοι ἀνεχόμεθα, βλασφημούμενοι παρακαλοῦμεν· ὡς περικαθάρματα τοῦ κόσμου ἐγενήθημεν πάντων περίψημα.’

Spring-time, it has been seen in the last chapter, is the season for purification by means of the placation of ghosts. But spring-time is not the only anxious time for primitive man. As the year wears on, a season approaches of even more critical import, when purification was even more imperatively needed, the season of harvest; in the earliest days the gathering in of such wild fruits as nature herself provides, in later times the reaping and garnering of the various kinds of cereals.

In the North with our colder climate we associate harvest with autumn; our harvest festivals fall at the end of September. September was to the Greek the month of the grape harvest, the vintage, but his grain harvest fell in ancient days as now in the month Thargelion, the latter part of May and the beginning of June. This month is marked to the Greeks by three festivals, the Thargelia, which gave its name to the month, the Kallynteria, and the Plynteria. No festival has been more frequently discussed than the Thargelia, and on no festival has comparative anthropology thrown more light. The full gist of the ceremony has never, I think, been clearly set forth, owing to the simple fact that the Thargelia has usually been considered alone, not in connection with the two other festivals[186]. In the present chapter I shall consider first that element in the festival to which it and the month owe their names, i.e. the first-fruits; second, the ceremony of the Pharmakos, which has made the festival famous; third the connection with the Kallynteria and Plynteria and the light thrown on both by the Roman festival of the Vestalia. Finally from the consideration of the gist of these harvest festivals it will be possible to add some further elements to our conception of Greek religious thought, and especially of the Greek notion of sacrifice.

THARGELION AND THARGELIA.

About the meaning[187] of the word Thargelia there is happily not the slightest doubt. Athenaeus[188] quotes a statement made by Krates, a writer of about the middle of the 2nd century A.D., in his book on the Attic dialect as follows: ‘The thargelos is the first loaf made after the carrying home of the harvest.’ Now a loaf of bread is not a very primitive affair, but happily Hesychius[189] records an earlier or at least more rudimentary form of nourishment: ‘Thargelos,’ he says, ‘is a pot full of seeds.’ From Athenaeus[190] again we learn that the cake called thargelos was sometimes also called thalusios. The Thalusia, the festival of the first-fruits of Demeter, is familiar to us from the lovely picture in the Seventh Idyll of Theocritus[191]. The friends meet Lycidas the goatherd and say to him:

‘The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way, For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.’

Homer[192] tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to waste the land of the Aetolians, because Oineus their king forgot to celebrate the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the passage, says: ‘The first-fruits are the thalusia.’ He adds that some of the rhetoricians call the thalusia ‘feasts of the Harvest-Home.’

It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is in the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion of harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. Of one of these harvest rites, the carrying of the Eiresione[193], we have unusually full particulars.

In the Knights of Aristophanes[194], Cleon and the Sausage-Seller are clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks angrily:

‘Who’s bawling there? do let the door alone, You’ve torn my Eiresione all to bits.’

The scholiast explains. ‘At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia the Athenians hold a feast to Helios and the Horae, and the boys carry about branches twined with wool, from which they get the name of Eiresiones, and they hang them up before the doors.’ It is very probable that the wool (εἶρος), taken perhaps from a sacred animal, gave its name to the Eiresione, but there were many other things besides wool hung on the branch. Our fullest account comes from the rhetorician Pausanias, who is quoted by Eustathius[195] in his commentary on the Iliad. Eustathius is explaining that the term ἀμφιθαλής means a child with both parents alive, and he adds by way of illustration that children of this sort were chosen by the ancients to deck out the Eiresione. He then quotes from the works of Pausanias the following account of the ceremony: ‘The Eiresione is a branch of olive twined with wool, and having hanging from it various fruits of the earth; a boy, both of whose parents are alive, carries it forth and places it in front of the doors of Apollo’s sanctuary, at the feast of Pyanepsia.’ He then goes on to an aetiological legend about Theseus, and finally records the words of the song sung by the children who carried or attended the Eiresione:

‘Eiresione brings All good things, Figs and fat cakes to eat, Soft oil and honey sweet, And brimming wine-cup deep That she may drink and sleep.’

The boy who actually carried the Eiresione must have both parents alive, because any contact with death even remote was unlucky; the ghost of either parent might be about. The song is of some interest because of the half-personification of Eiresione. The Maypole or harvest-sheaf is halfway to a harvest Maiden; it is thus, as will be seen later, that a goddess is made. A song is sung, a story told, and the very telling fixes the outline of personality. It is possible to worship long in spirit, but as soon as the story-telling, myth-making, instinct awakes you have anthropomorphism and theology.

What was hung on the Eiresione no doubt depended on the wealth of particular worshippers; we hear of white wool and purple wool, vessels of wine, figs, strings of acorns, cakes; nothing in the way of natural produce came amiss. The Eiresione once fixed over the door remained there, a charm against pestilence and famine, till the next year; then it was changed for a new one. The withered branch must have been a familiar sight at Athens. When in the Plutus[196] of Aristophanes the young rough is insulting the old woman and thrusting his torch into her withered face, she cries:

‘For pity’s sake don’t bring your torch so near me,’

and Chremylus says:

‘Yes, right she is, for if she caught a spark She’d burn up like an old Eiresione.’

The Eiresione, Pausanias says, was fastened before the door of the sanctuary of Apollo. Plutarch[197], in his rather clumsy aetiological account of the Oschophoria, connects the Eiresione with vows paid to Apollo by Theseus on his return from Crete to Athens. Harpocration[198] says ‘The Thargelia was celebrated in the month of Thargelion, which is sacred to Apollo,’ and the author of the Etymologicon Magnum[199] states ‘The Thargelia, a festival at Athens. The name is given from the thargelia, and thargelia are all the fruits that spring from the earth. The festival is celebrated in the month Thargelion to Artemis and Apollo.’ From Suidas[200] we learn that there was a musical contest at the Thargelia, and that the actors dedicated their prize tripods in the sanctuary of Apollo known as the Pythion.

All this makes it quite clear that at some time or other the festival of the Thargelia was connected with the Olympian Apollo, and more vaguely with his sister Artemis, but the connection is obviously loose and late. The Eiresione was fastened up not only over the door of the sanctuary of Apollo, but over the house-door of any and every Athenian. The house of Demos was no sanctuary of Apollo. Moreover, when the scholiast on Aristophanes[201] is commenting on the Eiresione, he says, to our surprise, that it was carried and hung at the Thargelia and Pyanepsia in honour, not of Apollo and Artemis, but of ‘Helios and the Horae.’ Porphyry[202] does not definitely name the Eiresione, but he is clearly alluding to it when he speaks of the procession that still took place at Athens in his own day to Helios and the Horae. It is evidence, he says, that in early days the gods desired in their service not the sacrifice of animals, but the offering of vegetable first-fruits. ‘In this procession they carried wild herbs as well as ground pulse, acorns, barley, wheat, a cake of dried figs, cakes of wheat and barley flour, and a pot (χύτρος).’

It is abundantly clear that the Eiresione is simply a harvest-home, an offering of first-fruits that was primarily an end in itself, but that could easily be affiliated to any dominant god. It will be remembered[203] that Oineus got into trouble because, when all the other gods had their feasts of hecatombs, he did not offer first-fruits to Artemis, great daughter of Zeus. Oineus, we may conjecture, was the faithful conservative worshipper of earlier gods; the Athenians were wiser in their generation; their ancient service of the primitive Helios and the Horae they somehow affiliated to that of the incoming Olympians.

* * * * *

It remains to ask more precisely what was the primitive significance of the offering of first-fruits. At first sight it may seem as if the question were superfluous. Surely we have here the simplest possible instance of the service of ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία), the primitive sacrifice that embodies the very essence of do ut des, a gift given to the god to ‘smooth his face,’ a gift that necessarily presupposes the existence of a god with a face to be smoothed.

Such seems to have been the view of Aristotle[204]. He says in characteristically Greek fashion, ‘They hold sacrifices, and meetings in connexion therewith, paying rites of worship to the gods while providing rest and recreation for themselves. For the most ancient sacrifices and meetings seem to be as it were offerings of first-fruits after the gathering in of the various harvests. For those were the times of year when the ancients were especially at leisure.’ Aristotle clearly takes the view of sacrifice already discussed, that sacrifice is mainly an occasion for enjoyment and the result of leisure, but his remark as to its early connection with first-fruits goes deeper down than he himself knows. Regarded as a θυσία, a sacrifice, the offering of first-fruits presupposes, as we have said, a god or spirit to whom sacrifice is made, and a god of human passions. But it must not be forgotten that in this view we are making a very large assumption, i.e. that of the existence of some such god or spirit. It is instructive to note that among other primitive races ceremonies have been observed which apparently are not addressed to any god or spirit, and yet which seem to contain in them a possible germ of some idea akin to sacrifice.

Such are the ceremonies of the Australian Arunta, observed and described in detail by Messrs Spencer and Gillen[205]. These ceremonies, consisting of lengthy and elaborate mummeries, are called Intichiuma, and their object seems to be to secure the increase of the animal or plant associated with a particular totem. The pantomimes enacted seem to be of the nature of sympathetic magic, and they are interspersed with chanted invitations to the particular plant or animal to be fertile. The point of special interest is that the ceremonies are closely connected with certain taboos on particular foods. Mr Lang[206] suggests that the removal of the taboo at the time of the Intichiuma may indicate that the necessary ‘close time’ is over. The imposition of the taboo is on this showing not due to any primary moral instinct in man, but simply a practical necessity if the plant or animal is not to become extinct. The removal of the taboo after a suitable lapse of time is, if man himself is not to become extinct, equally practical and necessary. This sort of taboo is in fact a kind of primitive ‘game law.’ Philochoros[207] gives an instance: ‘At Athens,’ he says, ‘a prohibition was issued that no one should eat of unshorn lamb on the occasion of failure in the breed of sheep.’ If at the end of the close time it was customary to eat a little of a plant or animal, the eating being accompanied by certain solemn ceremonials, the food itself would easily come to be regarded as specially sacred and as having sacramental virtue, and the further step would soon be taken of regarding it as consecrated to certain spirits or divinities. This may have been in part the origin of the offering of first-fruits.

The removal of a taboo is assuredly not the same thing as the worship of a god, but it is easy to see how the one might slide over into the other. A taboo is by common consent placed upon the harvest fruits till all are ripe: such harvest-fruits are sacred, forbidden, dangerous. Why? As soon as primitive man has fashioned for himself any sort of god in his own image, the answer is ready, ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God.’ Primitive man is so instinctively anthropomorphic that it seems to me rash to assert that the notion of taboo precedes that of sacrifice. The natives of Central Australia appear to have taboo without the notion of sacrifice, i.e. of any spirit to whom sacrifice is made; another race might have a primitive notion of a spirit to be placated without the notion of taboo; or the two might be inextricably blended and only our modern habit of pitiless analysis separate them.

Late writers on ritual, and it is only late that there are such writers, always explain taboo as consecration rather than prohibition. Festus[208] says ‘they called the juice of the vine sacrima because they sacrificed (or consecrated) it to Liber with a view to the protection of the vineyards and the vessels and the wine itself, just as they sacrificed to Ceres a first harvest from the ears they had first reaped.’ Here the ‘sacramental’ wine is clearly a sacrifice of the Olympian kind; but in the Pithoigia, already discussed, the more primitive notions of release from taboo and ‘aversion’ of evil influences clearly emerge. ‘Libation of the new wine is poured out that the use of the magical thing (φαρμάκου) may become harmless and a means of safety[209].’ In the Thargelia we have no definite information as to a solemn eating as well as offering of first-fruits, but this element will appear when we reach the great harvest festival commonly known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

* * * * *

It remains to note some details as to the material of sacrifice. The general principle is clear and simple. The god fares as his worshipper. Porphyry[210], in discussing the various kinds of animals sacrificed, observes with much common sense, ‘No Greek sacrifices a camel or an elephant to the gods, because Greece does not produce camels and elephants.’

It might not be necessary to state a fact so obvious but that writers on the subject of ritual seem haunted by the notion that certain animals are sacrificed to certain gods because they are in some mystical sense ‘sacred to them,’ and this notion has introduced much needless complexity. It is quite true that locally we find certain taboos on the sacrifice of certain animals, the cause of which is unknown, but these taboos are local and by no means uniform. Moreover the animal ‘sacred’ to the particular god is by no means always the material of sacrifice; the owl, for reasons to be later discussed, is ‘sacred’ to Athene, but we hear of no sacrifice of owls. Broadly then, as noted before, the material of sacrifice is conditioned, not by the character of the god, but by the circumstances of the worshipper.

The principle that the god fares as his worshipper is however crossed by another, he sometimes fares worse. This was noticed by writers on ritual such as Porphyry[211] and Eustathius[212], and they explain it as a sort of survival of a golden age of simple manners, dear to the conservatism of the gods. This conservatism of the gods mirrors, of course, the natural and timid conservatism of their worshippers. They have begun by offering just what they eat themselves, and, from the fact that they have once offered it, they attach to this food special sanctity. They advance in civilization, and their own food becomes more delicate and complex, but they dare not make any change in the diet of their gods; they have learnt to bake and eat fermented bread themselves, but the gods are still nurtured on barley grains and porridge. Porphyry[213] reduces the successive stages of sacrifice to a regular system of progressive vegetarianism. First men plucked and offered grass, which was like the ‘soft wool’ of the earth; then the fruit of trees and their leaves, the acorn and the nut; then barley appeared first of the grains, and they offered simple barley-corns; then they broke and bruised grain and made it into cakes. In like fashion they made libations first of water, then of honey, the natural liquid prepared for us by bees, thirdly of oil, and last of all of wine; but after each advance the older service remained ‘in memory of the ancient manner of life.’ Last, through diverse influences of ignorance and fear, came ‘the luxury of flesh and imported forms of diet[214].’

The incoming of the luxury of flesh diet was, it has already been noted, due not to ignorance and fear but to the inroad of a flesh-eating Northern race whose splendid physical stature and strength Porphyry was little likely to appreciate. They were not wholly flesh-eaters; hence, as has been seen, they offered the sacrifice of the barley grains (οὐλοχύται), and offered these at a time when they were themselves eating some form of manufactured bread. The primitive character of the rite is, I think, marked by the ritual precedence. The οὐλοχύται, the sprinkling of grains, has usually been explained as the sprinkling of meal on the heads of the victims, as the equivalent of the mola salsa of the Romans; but Eustathius is probably right when, in commenting on the sacrifice of Nestor[215], he says, ‘the sprinkled grains are in memory of the food of old times which consisted in grains, i.e. barley-corns’. ‘Hence,’ he adds, ‘one of the ancient commentators explains the sprinkled grains as barley-corns.’ That οὐλοχύται were nothing more nor less than the actual barley-corns is also shewn by a passage from Strato[216]. A cook, who apparently from his use of archaic terminology is according to his master more like a male sphinx than a cook, calls for οὐλοχύται:

‘Οὐλοχύται—why what on earth is that?’

And the answer is

‘Just barley-corns.’

The first act in a Homeric sacrifice was uniformly prayer and the sprinkling of grain[217], and it is important to observe that Eustathius[218] expressly notes this as a previous sacrifice (πρόθυμα); the οὐλοχύται were, he says, a mixture of grain and salt poured on the altar before the sacrificial ceremony began. By the ‘sacrificial ceremony’ Eustathius means the slaying of the animal victim. It is important to note that the grain was poured on the altar and was therefore in itself a sacrifice, as it is sometimes stated that it was merely thrown on the head of the victim. The statement of Eustathius is confirmed by the account in Euripides[219] of the sacrifice made by Aegisthus to the Nymphs. Here, before the elaborate slaying of the bull, we have, just as in Homer, the sprinkling of the grain, and it is sprinkled on the altar. The Messenger tells Electra that when all was ready Aegisthus

‘Took the grains for sprinkling and he cast them Upon the altar and these words he spake.’

The sprinkling of salted meal (mola salsa) was, if we may believe Athenaeus[220], a later innovation. He tells us distinctly, quoting Athenion as his authority, that the use of salt for seasoning was a comparatively late discovery and therefore excluded from certain sacrifices to the gods.

‘Whence even now, remembering days of old, The entrails of their victims for the gods They roast with fire and bring no salt thereto, Because at first they knew no use for salt. And even when they knew and loved its savour They kept their fathers’ sacred written precepts.’

The sacrifice of the animal victim never in Homer takes place without the ‘previous sacrifice’ of grain-sprinkling and prayer, but prayer and grain-sprinkling can take place, as in the prayer of Penelope[221], without the animal sacrifice. This looks as though the animal sacrifice were rather a supplementary later-added act than a necessary climax. Later, when animal sacrifice became common and even as a rule imperative, the real sacrificial intent of the preliminary grain-sprinkling would naturally become obscured and it would be brought into connection with animal sacrifice by the practice of sprinkling grain on the heads of the victims.

By Plutarch’s[222] time the sprinkling of grain was regarded as something of an archaeological curiosity. He asks in his Greek Questions ‘Who is he who is called among the Opuntians krithologos,’ i.e. the ‘barley collector’? The answer is ‘Most of the Greeks make use of barley for their very ancient sacrifices when the citizens offer first-fruits. And the man who regulates these sacrifices and gets in these first-fruits is called krithologos.’ He adds a curious detail illustrative of the two strata of worship, ‘and they had two priests, one to supervise divine things, one for those of things demonic.’ In like archaic fashion, when Pisthetairos[223] would inaugurate the blessed simplicity of bird-rule, he revives the ancient ritual of the sprinkling of barley-corns:

‘O better than worship of Zeus Most High Is the service of Birds that sing and fly. They ask for no carven temple’s state, They clamour not for a golden gate. The shrine they ask of a mortal’s vow Is leave to perch on an olive bough. In the little thickets of ash and oak They dwell anigh us. We humble folk Never need fare to the far-off lands Of Ammon or Delphi, but lift our hands Under our vine and our fig-tree’s shade. For a slender grace let our prayer be said, As we cast up our barley in little showers And a little grace from the Birds is ours.’

The barley grain sprinkled is part of the ritual of the Olympians, but in the case of the two survivals to be next considered, the pelanos and the nephalia, their use was almost wholly confined to, and characteristic of, the lower stratum of worship, that of ghosts and sprites and underworld divinities.

After the sacrifice of the natural fruits of the earth, the παγκαρπία, comes the most primitive form of artificial food, i.e. the pelanos, a sort of porridge.

We speak of Bread and Wine as sacramental elements, but both are far removed from being elemental. Leavened bread, the Greek ἄρτος, is a product of advanced civilization, and with a true conservative ritual instinct the Roman Church prescribes to this day the use of the unleavened wafer. Athenaeus[224], citing the author of a play called the Beggars, tells us that when the Athenians set a meal in the Prytaneum for the Dioscuri they serve upon the tables cheese and barley-porridge (φυστήν) and chopped olives and leeks, making remembrance of their ancient mode of life. And Solon bids them supply to those who had free meals in the Prytaneum barley cake (μᾶζαν), but at feasts to place in addition loaves of bread (ἄρτον), and this in imitation of Homer. For Homer, when he brought the chiefs together to Agamemnon, says ‘they stirred up meal.’ The words ‘they stirred up meal,’ φύρετο δ’ ἄλφιτα, do not occur in our text, but the author of the Beggars clearly refers to the ordinary Homeric meal, and takes us straight back to the real primitive meaning of pelanos. On the shield of Achilles[225] we have the picture of a harvest feast:

‘The heralds dight the feast apart beneath a spreading oak, The ox they slew, and much white barley-meal the women folk Sprinkled, a supper for the thralls.’

The lord and his fellows feast on flesh-meat, the workmen have their supper of primitive porridge. So the Townley scholiast clearly understands the passage; he comments: πάλυνον, ἔμασσον ἢ ἔφυρον, ‘they sprinkle, i.e. they knead or mix together.’ It is noticeable that he employs the exact word, ἔφυρον, quoted by Athenaeus as in the text of Homer[226]. To explain the passage as ‘sprinkle on the heads of the victims or on the roast flesh’ is to miss the whole antithesis between master and man. Eustathius[227], that close observer of primitive fact, saw what was being done in Homer and doubtless still by the poor of his own days. He says ‘to sprinkle barley-meal does not mean bread-making but a sort of paste in ordinary use among the ancients.’ To any one who has watched the making of porridge, the shift of meaning from παλύνειν, to sprinkle, to φύρειν and μάσσειν, to stir and to knead, is natural and necessary. You first sprinkle the meal on the water, you then stir it, so far you have porridge; if you let it get thicker and thicker you must knead it and then you have oat-cake. It has of course frequently been noted that a pelanos may be either fluid or solid, and herein lies the explanation. When the pelanos is thick and subjected to fire, baked, it becomes a pemma, an ordinary cake. The Latin libum[228], a cake, is a strict parallel; it was primarily a thing out-poured, a libation, then a solid thing cooked and eaten.

A pelanos was then primarily the same as alphita, barley-meal. The food of man was the food of the gods, but the word was early specialized off to ritual use. There is, I believe, no instance in which a pelanos, under that name, is eaten in daily life or indeed eaten at all save by Earth and underworld gods, their representative snakes and other Spirits of Aversion[229]. The comic poet Sannyrion[230] puts it thus:

‘We gods do call it pelanos, You pompous mortals barley-meal.’

To us the pomposity seems on the side of the gods.

As there was a time when leavened bread was not, and men ate porridge cooked or uncooked, so before the coming of the vine men drank a honey drink. And as the conservative gods, long after men ate fermented bread, were faithful to their porridge, so long after men drank wine they still offered to the gods who were there before the coming of the vine ‘wineless libations,’ nephalia[231].

The ritual of the underworld gods is in many respects identical with that of the ghosts out of which they are developed, but with this difference—ghosts are less conservative than fully developed gods; the habits and tastes of ghosts are more closely akin to those of the men who worship them. Quite early, it would appear, man offered to ghosts the wine he loved so well himself.

Atossa[232] brings for the ghost of Darius a pelanos, as was meet. She brings also all manner of ‘soothing gifts’ (μειλικτήρια), but she pours wine also:

‘A holy heifer’s milk, white, fair to drink, Bright honey drops from flowers bee-distilled, With draughts of water from a virgin fount, And from the ancient vine its mother wild An unmixed draught, this gladness; and fair fruit Of gleaming olive ever blossoming And woven flowers, children of mother earth.’

The dead fare as the living; wine is added to milk and honey and olive oil and water, but wine perhaps significantly as an innovation is never named. Atossa seems also consciously to insist over much on its being wild, primitive, ancient, and therefore permissible. We are reminded of the religious shifts to which the Romans were put by the introduction of wine into their daily life and thence into their ritual. Plutarch[233] in his Roman Questions says that ‘when the women poured libations of wine to Bona Dea, they called it by the name of milk,’ and Macrobius[234] adds ‘that wine could not be brought in under its own name, but the wine was called milk and the vessel containing it a honey-jar.’

The ghosts of the dead admit and even welcome the addition of wine, but actual chthonic divinities are stricter. When Oedipus[235] came to the precinct of the Semnae, the Chorus bid him make atonement, because, though unwittingly, he has violated the precinct. He asks the precise ritual to be observed. The answer, though it is thrice familiar, is so important for the understanding of chthonic ceremonies that it must be given in full:

‘Oed. And with what rites, O strangers? teach me this.

Chor. First, fetch thou from an ever-flowing fount, Borne in clean hands, an holy drink-offering.

Oed. And next, when I have brought the holy draught?

Chor. Bowls are there next, a cunning craftsman’s work, Crown thou their lips and handles at the brim.

Oed. With branches, woollen webs, or in what wise?

Chor. Of the ewe-lamb take thou the fresh-shorn wool.

Oed. So be it, and then to what last rite I pass?

Chor. Pour thy drink offerings, facewards to the dawn.

Oed. With these same vessels do I pour the draught?

Chor. Yes, in three streams, the last pour wholly out.

Oed. And filled wherewith this last? teach me this also.

Chor. Water and honey—bring no wine thereto.

Oed. When the dark shadowed earth hath drunk of this?

Chor. Lay on it thrice nine sprays of olive tree With both thine hands, and make thy prayer the while.

Oed. That prayer? vouchsafe to teach, for mighty is it.

Chor. Pray thou that, as they are called the Kindly Ones, With kindly hearts they may receive and bless. Be this thy prayer, thine own or his who prays For thee. Whisper thy prayer nor lift thy voice, Then go, look not behind, so all is well.’

The Kindly Ones, though their name is only adjectival, have crystallized into divinities; they are no longer ghosts, and none may tamper with their archaic ritual.

For the dread counterpart of the Eumenides, the Erinyes, there is the same wineless service, witness the reproach of Clytaemnestra. The Erinyes have deserted her, yet she has given them of the ritual they exact[236]:

‘Full oft forsooth from me have ye licked up Wineless libations, sober balms of wrath.’

To offer wine was the last outrage done by the parvenu Apollo to ancient ritual, hence the bitter protest[237]:

‘Thou hast bewildered the old walks of life, With wine the Ancient Goddesses undone.’

The wineless service of the Eumenides in the Oedipus Coloneus is of course no mere invention of the poet. At Titane near Sicyon Pausanias[238] came to a grove of evergreen oaks and a temple of the goddesses whom, he says, the Athenians call Semnae, but the Sicyonians Eumenides, and every year on one day they celebrate a festival in their honour, ‘sacrificing sheep with young and a libation of water and honey.’

The scholiast in the Oedipus Coloneus[239] gives a list of the divinities to whom at Athens wineless sacrifices were made. He quotes as his authority Polemon. ‘The Athenians were careful in these matters and scrupulously pious (ὅσιοι) in the things that pertain to the gods, and they made wineless sacrifices to Mnemosyne the Muse, to Eos, to Helios, to Selene, to the Nymphs, to Aphrodite Ourania.’ The list is at first surprising. We associate nephalia with the Underworld powers, but here it is quite clear that, in primitive days, side by side with the Earth-gods were worshipped sky-gods, but in their own simple being as Dawn and Sun and Moon, not as full-blown human Olympians. Mnemosyne[240], it will later be seen, had a well of living water herself; she needed no wine. The Heavenly Aphrodite is more surprising, but her honey libation is further attested by Empedokles[241]. He tells of the days long ago when the god Ares was not, nor King Zeus, nor Kronos, nor Poseidon, but only

‘Kypris the Queen Here they adored with pious images, With painted victims and with fragrant scents, With fume of frankincense and genuine myrrh. Honey of yellow bees upon the ground They for libation poured.’

But though here and there a very early ‘Heavenly One’ claimed the honey service, it was mostly the meed of the dead. Porphyry knew that honey was used to embalm the body of the dead because it prevented putrefaction, and this custom of honey burial is echoed in the myth of Glaukos and the honey-jar. The marvellous sweetness of honey lent itself to the notions of propitiation and placation—‘sweets to the sweet’ or rather, as it seemed to the practical primitive mind, ‘sweets to the spirits to be sweetened,’ the Meilichioi, ghosts and heroes to be appeased[242].

One more element in archaic ritual yet remains to be considered—the fireless sacrifice.

Fire, it has been seen, was used in the Homeric burnt sacrifice for sublimation. By fire, Eustathius[243] says in speaking of the burning of the dead among the northern nations, ‘the divine element was borne on high as though in a chariot and mingled with the heavenly beings.’ In like fashion we may suppose the burnt victim was freed from the grosser elements and in purified vaporous form ascended to the gods of the upper air. This is what Porphyry[244] means when he says that in burnt sacrifice we ‘immortalize the dues of the heavenly gods by means of fire.’ Fire again in the service of the underworld gods was used, it has further been seen, for utter destruction, for the holocaust. But in certain rituals established, it may be, before the discovery of fire, it was definitely prescribed that the sacrifice should be fireless. Diogenes Laertius[245] relates that according to tradition there was but one altar in Delos at which Pythagoras could worship, the ‘Altar of Apollo the Sire,’ which stood behind the great Altar of the Horns, because on this altar wheat and barley and cakes are the only offering laid and the sacrifice is without fire and there is no sacrificial victim—so Aristotle stated in his Constitution of the Delians. This altar was also known as the Altar of the Pious. The foundation of the great blood-stained Altar of the Horns may still be seen in Delos; the primitive Altar of the Sire has left no trace, but in some bygone time a voice, it would seem, had been heard on Mount Cynthus saying, ‘Thou shalt not hurt nor destroy in all my Holy Mountain.’

What ancient worship of a ‘Sire’ Apollo had taken to himself in Delos we do not know, but in remote Arcadia a fireless sacrifice of a specially simple kind went on right down to the time of Pausanias[246] in honour of a home-grown goddess, Demeter. At Phigalia Pausanias visited the cave-sanctuary of the Black Demeter; indeed he says in his pious way it was chiefly for her sake that he went to Phigalia, and he adds ‘I sacrificed no victim to the goddess, such being the custom of the people of the country. They bring instead as offerings the fruit of the vine and of other trees they cultivate, and honey-combs and wool which is still unwrought and full of the natural grease; these they lay on the altar which is set up in front of the cave, and having laid them there they pour on them olive oil. Such is the rite of sacrifice observed by private persons and once a year by the Phigalian people collectively.’ Everything here prescribed is in its most natural form, grapes rather than wine, honey-comb rather than honey, unwrought wool not artificial fillets, and the service is fireless. It was a service to content even Pythagoras.

That there was between the early fireless sacrifice and the burnt sacrifice of the Olympian in some prehistoric time a rivalry and clashing of interests, is clear from the Rhodian tradition of the Heliadae. Pindar[247] tells how:

‘Up to the hill they came, Yet in their hand No seed of burning flame, And for the Rhodian land With fireless rite The grove upon the citadel they dight.’

And the scholiast commenting on the passage says: ‘The Rhodians going up to the Acropolis to sacrifice to Athene, forgot to take fire with them for their offerings (ἐναγίσμασι) and made a fireless sacrifice. Hence it came about that, as the Athenians were the first to sacrifice by fire, Athene thought it best to live with them.’ Athene was always a prudent goddess, ready to swim with the tide; she was ‘all for the father,’ all for the Olympians, and she had her reward. Philostratos[248] tells the same story with something more of emphasis. He contrasts the Acropolis of Athens and the Acropolis of Rhodes; the Rhodians had only a fireless cheap service, the people of Athens provide the savour of burnt sacrifice and fragrant smoke; the goddess went to live with them because ‘they were wiser in their generation (σοφωτέρους) and good at sacrificing.’ From Diodorus[249] we learn that it was Cecrops who introduced the fire-sacrifice at Athens. On Cecrops were fathered many of the innovations of civilized life, among them marriage. He was halfway between the old and the new, half civilized man, half snake. He, Pausanias[250] significantly tells us, was the first to give to Zeus the name of the Highest. He too became all for the Olympian.

These forms of primitive sacrifice—the pelanos, the barley grains, the nephalia, the fireless rites—have been considered at some length because, though in part they went over to the Olympians, they remain broadly speaking and in their simplest forms characteristic of the lower stratum and of the worship of underworld spirits. Moreover it is these primitive rites which were, as will later be seen, taken up and mysticized by the religion of Orpheus.

It remains to consider the second and by far the most important element in the harvest festival of the Thargelia, the ceremony of the Pharmakos.

THE PHARMAKOS.

That the leading out of the pharmakos was a part of the festival of the Thargelia we know from Harpocration[251]. He says in commenting on the word: ‘At Athens they led out two men to be purifications for the city; it was at the Thargelia, one was for the men and the other for the women.’ These men, these pharmakoi, whose function it was to purify the city, were, it will later be seen, in all probability put to death, but the expression used by Harpocration is noteworthy—they were led out. The gist of the ceremony is not death but expulsion; death, if it occurs, is incidental.

The ceremony of expulsion took place, it is again practically certain, on the 6th day of Thargelion, a day not lightly to be forgotten, for it was the birthday of Socrates. Diogenes Laertius[252] says in his life of Socrates: ‘He was born on the 6th day of Thargelion, the day when the Athenians purify the city.’ The pharmakos is not expressly named, but it will be seen in the sequel that the cleansing of the city by the expulsion of the pharmakos was regarded as the typical purification of the whole year. The etymology of the word will be best considered when the nature of the rites has been examined[253].

The ceremony of the pharmakos has been often discussed, but I think frequently and fundamentally misapprehended. It appears at first sight to involve what we in our modern terminology call ‘Human Sacrifice.’ To be told that this went on in civilized Athens in the 5th cent. B.C. shocks our preconceived notions of what an Athenian of that time would be likely to do or suffer. The result is that we are inclined to get out of the difficulty in one of two ways: either we try to relegate the ceremony of the pharmakos to the region of prehistoric tradition, or we so modify and mollify its main issues as to make it unmeaning.

The issue before us is a double one and must not be confused. We have to determine what the ceremonial of the pharmakos was, and next, did that ceremonial last on into historic times?

My own view is briefly this: that we have no positive evidence that it did last on into the 5th century B.C., but that, if the gist of the ceremonial is once fairly understood, there is no a priori difficulty about its continuance, and that, this a priori difficulty being removed, we shall accept an overwhelming probability. The evidence for the historical pharmakos is just as good as e.g. the evidence for the chewing of the buckthorn at the Anthesteria.

It should be noted at the outset that the pharmakos, i.e. the human scape-goat, though it seems to us a monstrous and horrible notion, was one so familiar to the Greek mind as to be in Attic literature practically proverbial. Aristophanes[254] wants to point the contrast between the old mint of sterling state officials and the new democratic coinage: he says, now-a-days we fill offices by

‘Any chance man that we come across, Not fit in old days for a pharmakos, These we use And these we choose, The veriest scum, the mere refuse,’

and again in a fragment[255]:

‘Your kinsman! how and whence, you pharmakos,’

and in the Knights[256] Demos says to Agoracritos:

‘I bid you take the seat In the Prytaneum where this pharmakos Was wont to sit.’

Pharmakos is in fact, like its equivalent ‘offscouring’ (κάθαρμα), a current form of utter abuse, disgust and contempt.

Moreover its ritual import was perfectly familiar. Lysias[257] in his speech against Andokides is explicit: ‘We needs must hold that in avenging ourselves and ridding ourselves of Andokides we purify the city and perform apotropaic ceremonies, and solemnly expel a pharmakos and rid ourselves of a criminal; for of this sort the fellow is.’

For the fullest details of the horrid ceremony we are indebted to a very late author. Tzetzes[258] (A.D. 1150) in his Thousand Histories describes it as follows: ‘The pharmakos was a purification of this sort of old. If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of God, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other mischief, they led forth as though to a sacrifice the most unsightly of them all as a purification and a remedy to the suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed place, and gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs, and seven times they smote him with leeks and wild figs and other wild plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of wild trees and scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, for a purification, as I said, of the suffering city. Just as, I think, Lycophron records it of the Locrian maidens, speaking somewhat after this manner, I do not remember the exact verse, “when, having consumed their limbs with fuel from fruitless trees, the flame of fire cast into the sea the ashes of the maidens that died on the hill of Traron.”’

Tzetzes is not inventing the ceremonies, and in his awkward confused way he goes on to tell us his source—the iambic poet Hipponax. ‘And Hipponax gives us the best complete account of the custom when he says, ‘to purify the city and strike (the pharmakos) with branches’; and in another place he says in his first iambic poem, ‘striking him in the meadow and beating him with branches and with leeks like a pharmakos’; and again in other places he says as follows: ‘we must make of him a pharmakos’; and he says, ‘offering him figs and a barley cake and cheese such as pharmakoi eat’; and ‘they have long been waiting agape for them, holding branches in their hands as pharmakoi do’; and somewhere else he says in the same iambic poem, ‘may he be parched with hunger, so that in (their) anger he may be led as pharmakos and beaten seven times.’

Tzetzes quotes for us six fragmentary statements from Hipponax, and the words of Hipponax correspond so closely in every detail with his own account that we are justified in supposing that his account of the end of the ceremonial, the burning and scattering of the ashes, is also borrowed; but the evidence of this from Hipponax he omits.

Hipponax makes his statements apparently, not from any abstract interest in ritual, but as part of an insult levelled at his enemy Boupalos. This is made almost certain by another fragment of Hipponax[259] in which he says, ‘as they uttered imprecations against that abomination (ἅγος) Boupalos.’ The fragments belong obviously to one or more iambic poems in which Hipponax expresses the hope that Boupalos will share the fate of a pharmakos, will be insulted, beaten, driven out of the city, and at last presumably put to death. Hipponax is not describing an actual historical ceremony, but to make his insults have any point he must have been alluding to a ritual that was, in the 6th century B.C., perfectly familiar to his hearers.

Some of the statements of Hipponax as to the details of the ritual are confirmed from other sources, and are given in these with certain slight variations which seem to show that Hipponax was not the only source of information.

Helladius[260] the Byzantine, quoted by Photius, says that ‘it was the custom at Athens to lead in procession two pharmakoi with a view to purification; one for the men, one for the women. The pharmakos of the men had black figs round his neck, the other had white ones, and he says they were called συβάκχοι.’ Helladius added that ‘this purification was of the nature of an apotropaic ceremony to avert diseases, and that it took its rise from Androgeôs the Cretan, when at Athens the Athenians suffered abnormally from a pestilential disease, and the custom obtained of constantly purifying the city by pharmakoi.’

The man and woman and the black and white figs are variant details. Helladius is our sole authority for the curious name συβάκχοι: what this means is not certain. The term may have meant ‘pig-Bacchoi.’ The Bacchoi, as will later be seen, were sacred and specially purified persons with magical powers, and the term may have been applied to mark analogous functions. Crete was the home of ceremonies of purification.

Harpocration, in the passage already quoted, confirms the view that there were two pharmakoi, but he says they were both men: one for the women, one for the men. The discrepancy is not serious. It would be quite easy if necessary to dress up a man as a woman, and even a string of white figs would be sufficient presentment of gender; simulata pro veris is a principle of wide acceptation in primitive ritual.

The beating of the pharmakoi was a point of cardinal importance. It was a ceremonial affair and done to the sound of the flute. Hesychius[261] says, ‘The song of the branches is a measure that they play on the flute when the pharmakoi are expelled, they being beaten with branches and fig sprigs. The pharmakos was actually called “he of the branches.”’ It must have been a matter of very early observation that beating is expulsive. You beat a bush, a bird escapes; you beat a garment, the dust comes out; you beat a man, the evil, whatever it be, will surely emerge. We associate beating with moral stimulus, but the first notion is clearly expulsive.

Probably some notion of the application or instigation of good as well as the expulsion of evil early came in. This may be conjectured from the fact that rods made of special plants and trees were used, notably leeks and fig-trees. Plants with strong smells, and plants the eating of which is purgative, are naturally regarded as ‘good medicine’; as expulsive of evil, and hence in a secondary way as promotive of good.

Pythagoras[262] taught that to have a leek hung up over a doorway was a good thing to prevent the entrance of evil, and Dioscorides[263] records the same belief. Lucian[264] makes Menippus relate how before he was allowed to consult the oracle of the dead he was ‘purged and wiped clean and consecrated with leek and torches.’

The locus classicus on beating with leek is of course the beating of the god Pan by his Arcadian worshippers. Theocritus[265] makes Simichidas sing:

‘Dear Pan, if this my prayer may granted be Then never shall the boys of Arcady Flog thee on back and flank with leeks that sting When scanty meat is left for offering; If not, thy skin with nails be flayed and torn And amid nettles mayst thou couch till morn.’

And the scholiast remarks, ‘they say that a festival was held in Arcadia in which the youths beat Pan with leeks when the officials sacrificed a small victim, and there was not enough to eat for the worshipper; or the Arcadians when they went out hunting if they had good sport paid honour to Pan; if the reverse they maltreated him with leeks because, being a mountain god, he had power over the produce of the chase.’ The first explanation confuses cause with effect, the second is undoubtedly right. Pan is beaten because, as lord of the chase, he has failed to do his business.

It is sometimes said that Pan is beaten, and the pharmakoi beaten, in order to ‘stimulate their powers of fertility.’ In a sense this is ultimately true, but such a statement gives a false and misleading emphasis. The image and the pharmakoi are beaten partly to drive out evil influences, partly, it should not be forgotten, to relieve the feelings of the beaters. When the evil influences are beaten out, the god will undoubtedly do better next time, but it is only in this sense that the powers of fertility are stimulated. The pharmakos has no second chance. He is utterly impure, so that the more purifying influences, the more good medicine brought to bear upon him, the better; but he is doomed to death, not to reform. In the Lupercalia, already discussed (p. 51), the women are struck by the februum as a fertility charm, but even here the primary notion must have been the expulsion of evil influences.

The beating, like the pharmakos, became proverbial. Aristophanes[266] makes Aeacus ask how he is to torture the supposed Xanthias, and the real Xanthias makes answer:

‘Oh, in the usual way, but when you beat him Don’t do it with a leek or a young onion.’

Here undoubtedly the meaning is, ‘don’t let this be a merely ceremonial beating, a religious performance,’ and the allusion gains in point by the fact that the supposed slave was a real god to be treated worse than a pharmakos. Lucian[267] says that the Muses, he is sure, would never deign to come near his vulgar book-buyer, and instead of giving him a crown of myrtle they will beat him with myrrh and mallow and get rid of him, so that he may not pollute their sacred fountains. Clearly here the vulgar book-buyer is a pharmakos.

We have then abundant evidence that the pharmakos was beaten; was he also put to death? Tzetzes, as has been seen, states that he was burnt with the wood of certain fruitless trees, and that his ashes were scattered to the sea and the winds. The scholiast on Aristophanes[268] also states expressly that by δημόσιοι, i.e. people fed and kept at the public expense, was meant ‘those who were called pharmakoi, and these pharmakoi purified cities by their slaughter.’ So far his statement is of the most general character, and it need not have been inferred that he was speaking of Athens, but he goes on, ‘for the Athenians maintained certain very ignoble and useless persons, and on the occasion of any calamity befalling the city, I mean a pestilence or anything of that sort, they sacrificed these persons with a view to purification from pollution and they called them purifications’ (καθάρματα). Tzetzes said a pharmakos was excessively ungainly (ἀμορφότερον), the scholiast, worthless and useless. Aristophanes himself regarded them as the ‘scum’ of humanity.

The scholiast is of course a late and somewhat dubious authority, and did the fact of the death of the pharmakos rest on him and on Tzetzes alone, we might be inclined to question it. A better authority is preserved for us by Harpocration[269]; he says, ‘Istros (circ. B.C. 230), in the first book of his Epiphanies of Apollo, says that Pharmakos is a proper name, and that Pharmakos stole sacred phialae belonging to Apollo, and was taken and stoned by the men with Achilles, and the ceremonies done at the Thargelia are mimetic representations of these things.’ The aetiology of Istros is of course wrong, but it is quite clear that he believed the ceremonies of the Thargelia to include the stoning of a man to death.

That in primitive pharmakos-ceremonies the human pharmakos was actually put to death scarcely admits of doubt: that Istros believed this took place at the ceremony of the Thargelia in honour of Apollo may be inferred from his aetiology. There still remains in the minds of some a feeling that the Athens of the fifth century was too civilized a place to have suffered the actual death of human victims, and that periodically, as part of a public state ritual. This misgiving arises mainly, as was indicated at the outset, from a misunderstanding of the gist of the ceremony. Tzetzes, after the manner of his day, calls it a θυσία, a burnt sacrifice; but it was not really a sacrifice in our modern sense at all, though, as will later be shown, it was one of the diverse notions that went to the making of the ancient idea of sacrifice.

The pharmakos was not a sacrifice in the sense of an offering made to appease an angry god. It came to be associated with Apollo when he took over the Thargelia, but primarily it was not intended to please or to appease any spirit or god. It was, as ancient authors repeatedly insist, a καθαρμός, a purification. The essence of the ritual was not atonement, for there was no one to atone, but riddance, the artificial making of an ἄγος, a pollution, to get rid of all pollution. The notion, so foreign to our scientific habit of thought, so familiar to the ancients, was that evil of all kinds was a physical infection that could be caught and transferred; it was highly catching. Next, some logical savage saw that the notion could be utilized for artificial riddance. The Dyaks[270] sweep misfortunes out of their houses and put them into a toy-house made of bamboo; this they set adrift on a river. On the occasion of a recent outbreak of influenza in Pithuria ‘a man had a small carriage made, after a plan of his own, for a pair of scape-goats which were harnessed to it and driven to a wood at some distance where they were let loose. From that hour the disease completely ceased in the town. The goats never returned; had they done so the disease must have come back with them.’ It is needless for our purpose to accumulate instances of the countless varieties of scape-goats, carts, cocks, boats, that the ingenuity of primitive man has invented. The instance chosen shows as clearly as possible that, as the gist of the ceremony is magical riddance, it is essential that the scape-goat, whatever form he takes, should never return.

This necessity for utter destruction comes out very clearly in an account of the way the Egyptians treated their scape-goats. Plutarch[271] in his discourse on Isis and Osiris says, on the authority of Manetho, that in the dog-days they used to burn men alive whom they called Typhonians, and their ashes they made away with by winnowing and scattering them. The winnowing-fan in which the corn was tossed and by means of which the chaff was blown utterly away was to Clement of Alexandria[272] the symbol of utter ruin and destruction. In his protest against the ruinous force of convention among pagan people, he says finely: ‘let us fly from convention, it strangles men, it turns them away from truth, it leads them afar from life; convention is a noose, a place of execution, a pit, a winnowing-fan; convention is ruin.’

The pharmakos is killed then, not because his death is a vicarious sacrifice, but because he is so infected and tabooed that his life is a practical impossibility. The uneducated, among whom his lot would necessarily be cast, regard him as an infected horror, an incarnate pollution; the educated who believe no such nonsense know that the kindest thing is to put an end to a life that is worse than death. Moreover nearly every civilized state to this day offers ‘human sacrifice’ in the shape of the criminals it executes. Why not combine religious tradition with a supposed judicial necessity? Civilized Athens had its barathron; why should civilized Athens shrink from annually utilizing two vicious and already condemned criminals to ‘purify the city’?

The question of whether the pharmakos was actually put to death in civilized Athens is of course for our purpose a strictly subordinate one. It has only been discussed in detail because the answer that we return to it depends in great measure on how far we realize the primary gist of a pharmakos, i.e. the two notions of (a) the physicalness, the actuality of evil, and (b) the possibility of contagion and transfer.

Our whole modern conception of the scape-man is apt to be unduly influenced by the familiar instance of the Hebrew scape-goat. We remember how

‘The scape-goat stood all skin and bone While moral business, not his own, Was bound about his head.’

And the pathos of the proceeding haunts our minds and prevents us from realizing the actuality and the practicality of the more primitive physical taboo. It is interesting to note that even in this moralized Hebrew conception, the scape-goat was not a sacrifice proper; its sending away was preceded by sacrifice. The priest ‘made an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year,’ and when the sacrifice of bullock and goat and the burning of incense, and the sprinkling of blood was over, then and not till then the live goat was presented to the Lord[273]. The Hebrew scriptures emphasize the fact that the burden laid upon the goat is not merely physical evil, not pestilence or famine, but rather the burden of moral guilt. ‘And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities into a land not inhabited.’

But so close is the connection of moral and physical that even here, where the evil laid upon the scape-goat is moral only, there is evident danger of infection; the goat is sent forth into a land not inhabited and it would be manifestly undesirable that he should return. At Athens we hear of no confession of sins, it is famine and pestilence from which a terror-stricken city seeks riddance.

This physical aspect of evil is still more clearly brought out in a ceremony performed annually at Chaeronea. Plutarch[274] himself, when he was archon, had to preside over the ritual and has left us the account. A household slave was taken and ceremonially beaten with rods of agnus castus—again a plant of cathartic quality—and driven out of doors to the words, ‘Out with hunger, in with wealth and health.’ The ceremony was called the ‘expulsion of hunger,’ and Plutarch speaks of it as an ‘ancestral sacrifice.’ It was performed by each householder for his own house, and by the archon for the common hearth of the city. When Plutarch was archon he tells us the ceremony was largely attended. The name of the ‘ceremony’ is instructive, it is ἐξέλασις, riddance, expulsion, not as the pharmakos was, καθαρμός, purification; both are called θυσίαι, sacrifices, only by concession to popular usage when every religious ceremony is regarded as of the nature of burnt sacrifice. The ceremony of the pharmakos was taken on by Apollo, but in the Chaeronea ‘expulsion’ there is no pretence that any god is worshipped; the performance remains frankly magical.

At Chaeronea the slave was merely beaten and expelled. At Delphi a pharmakos ceremony of still milder form took place in which the victim was merely a puppet.

In his 12th Greek Question Plutarch asks, ‘What is Charila among the Delphians?’ His answer is as follows: ‘Concerning Charila they tell a story something on this wise. The Delphians were afflicted by a famine following after a drought. They came to the gates of the king’s palace with their children and their wives to make supplication. And the king distributed grain and pulse to the noblest of them as there was not enough for all. And there came a little girl who had lost both her father and mother, and she made supplication. But he struck her with his shoe and threw the shoe into her face. Now she was poor and desolate but of noble spirit, and she went away and loosed her girdle and hanged herself. As the famine went on and pestilence was added thereto, the Pythia gave an oracle to the king that he must appease Charila, a maiden who had died by her own hand. After some difficulty they found out that this was the name of the girl who had been struck. So they performed a sacrifice which had in it some admixture of a purification, and this they still perform every nine years.’

The tale told of Charila is, of course, pure aetiology, to account for certain features in an established ritual. The expression Plutarch uses, a ‘sacrifice with admixture of purification’ (μεμιγμένην τινὰ καθαρμοῦ θυσίαν), is interesting because it shows that though by his time almost every religious ceremony was called a θυσία, his mind is haunted by the feeling that the Charila ceremony was in reality a purification, a καθαρμός; he would have been nearer the truth had he said it was a ‘purification containing in it a certain element of sacrifice.’

He then proceeds to give the actual ritual. ‘The king is seated to preside over the pulse and the grain and he distributes it to all, both citizens and strangers: there is brought in an image of Charila as a little girl, and when they all receive the corn, the king strikes the image with his shoe and the leader of the Thyiades takes the image and conducts it to a certain cavernous place, and there fastening (a rope) round the neck of the image they bury it where they buried the strangled Charila.’

The festival Charila, festival of rejoicing and grace, is like the Thargelia, a festival of first-fruits containing the ceremony of the Pharmakos, only in effigy. Charila is beaten with a shoe: leather is to this day regarded as magically expulsive, though the modern surrogate is of white satin. On a curious vase in the National Museum at Athens[275], we have a representation of a wedding procession at which a man is in the act of throwing a shoe. It is still to-day regarded as desirable that bride and bridegroom should be hit, evil influences are thereby expelled, and the shower of fertilizing rice is made the more efficacious. The effigy of Charila is buried, not burnt, possibly a more primitive form of destruction. The origin of the ceremony is dated back to the time when the king was priest, but the actual celebrants are women.

A pharmakos ceremony that is known to have taken place at Marseilles adds some further instructive details. Servius, in commenting on the words auri sacra fames[276] ‘accursed hunger of gold,’ notes that sacer may mean accursed as well as holy, and he seems, rather vaguely, to realize that between these two meanings is the middle term ‘devoted.’ The use of the term, he says, is derived from a custom among the Gauls: ‘Whenever the inhabitants of Marseilles suffer from a pestilence, one of the poorer class offers himself to be kept at the public expense and fed on specially pure foods. After this has been done he is decorated with sacred boughs and clad in holy garments, and led about through the whole city to the accompaniment of curses, in order that upon him may fall all the ills of the whole city, and thus he is cast headlong down.’

Here we have the curious added touch that the vehicle of impurity is purified. To our modern minds pure and impure stand at two opposite poles, and if we were arraying a scape-goat we certainly should not trouble about his preliminary purification. But the ancients, as Servius dimly feels, knew of a condition that combined the two, the condition that the savage describes as ‘taboo.’ For this condition the Latins used the word ‘sacer,’ the Greeks, as has already been seen, the word ἄγος. It is in such complex primitive notions as those of sacer and ἄγος, that our modern habit of clear analysis and differentiation causes us to miss the full and complex significance.

* * * * *

The leading out of the pharmakos is then a purely magical ceremony based on ignorance and fear; it is not a human sacrifice to Apollo or to any other divinity or even ghost, it is a ceremony of physical expulsion. It is satisfactory to find that the etymology[277] of the word confirms this view, φαρμακός means simply ‘magic-man.’ Its Lithuanian cognate is burīn, magic; in Latin it appears as forma, formula, magical spell; our formulary retains some vestige of its primitive connotation. Φάρμακον in Greek means healing drug, poison, and dye, but all, for better for worse, are magical. To express its meaning we need what our language has lost, a double-edged word like the savage ‘medicine.’ The pharmakos of the Thargelia shows us a state of things in which man does not either tend or avert god[278] or ghost, but seeks, by the ‘medicine’ he himself makes, to do, on his own account, his spring or rather Whitsuntide ‘thorough cleaning.’ The ceremony of the pharmakos went in some sense to the making of the Greek and modern notion of sacrifice, but the word itself has other and perhaps more primitive connotations.

Tzetzes, looking back at the ceremony of the expulsion of the pharmakos, calls it a sacrifice (θυσία), but we need not imitate him in his confusion of ideas new and old. The rite of the Thargelia was a rite of expulsion, of riddance, which incidentally, as it were, involved loss of life to a human being. The result is, indeed, in both cases the same to the human being, but the two ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance express widely different conditions and sentiments in the mind of the worshipper.

It may indeed be doubted whether we have any certain evidence of ‘human sacrifice’ in our sense among the Greeks even of mythological days. A large number of cases which were by the tragedians regarded as such, resolve themselves into cases of the blood feud, cases such as those of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, when the object was really the placation of a ghost, not the service of an Olympian. Perhaps a still larger number are primarily not sacrifices, θυσίαι, but ceremonies of riddance and purification, καθαρμοί. The ultimate fact that lies behind such ceremonies is the use of a human pharmakos, and then later, when the real meaning was lost, all manner of aetiological myths are invented and some offended Olympian is introduced.

The case of the supposed ‘human sacrifice’ of Athamas is instructive, both as to its original content and as to the shifting sentiments with which it was regarded. When Xerxes came to Alos in Achaia his guides, Herodotus[279] tells us, anxious to give him all possible information as to local curiosities, told him the tradition about the sanctuary of Zeus Laphystios: ‘The eldest of the race of Athamas is forbidden to enter the Prytaneion which is called by the Achaians the Leïton. If he enters he can only go out to be sacrificed.’ It was further told how some, fearing this fate, had fled the country, and coming back and entering the Prytaneion were decked with fillets and led out in procession to be sacrificed (ὡς θύεταί τε ἐξηγέοντο στέμμασι πᾶς πυκασθεὶς καὶ ὡς σὺν πομπῇ ἐξαχθείς). Here there is obvious confusion, as the man who left the country to avoid death would never have been so foolish as, immediately on his return, to enter the forbidden place. The point is clear: great stress is laid on the leading forth in procession—the descendant of the royal race was a scape-goat. Herodotus makes this quite clear. Athamas was sacrificed because the Achaeans were making a purification of the land (καθαρμὸν τῆς χώρης ποιευμένων Ἀχαιῶν). Herodotus gives as the cause of this primitive and perfectly intelligible custom various conflicting reasons which well reflect the various stages of opinion through which the thinking Greek passed. We have first the real reason—Athamas as a scape-goat. Then the public conscience is uneasy, and we have a legend that the ‘sacrifice’ is interrupted at the moment of consummation either by Herakles (according to Sophocles in the lost Athamas) or by Kytissoros. It is wrong to sacrifice; hence the sacrifice is interrupted, but it is wrong to interrupt sacrifice, so the descendants of Kytissoros are punished. Then, finally, it is felt that the sacrifice must go on, but it is a dreadful thing, an ἄγος, so a chance of escape is given to the victim. Finally in the same complex legend we have the substitution of a ram for the human victim Phrixos.

Sometimes incidentally we learn that other peoples adopted the device which may have satisfied the Athenians, i.e. needing a pharmakos they utilized a man already condemned by the state. Thus in the long list of ‘human sacrifices’ drawn up by Porphyry[280] in his indictment of human ignorance and fear he mentions that on the 6th day of the month Metageitnion a man was sacrificed to Kronos, a custom, he says, which was maintained for a long time unchanged. A man who had been publicly condemned to death was kept till the time of the festival of Kronia. When the festival came they brought him outside the gates before the image (ἕδους) of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink and slew him. The victim is already doomed, and it would seem intoxicated before he is sacrificed.

In noting the substitution of animal for human sacrifice, one curious point remains to be observed. The step seems to us momentous because to us human life is sacrosanct. But to the primitive mind the gulf between animal and human is not so wide. The larger animals, and certain animals which for various reasons were specially venerated, were in early days also regarded as sacrosanct, and to slay them was murder, to be atoned for by purification.

This notion comes out very clearly in the ritual of the Murder of the Ox, the Bouphonia[281], or, as it was sometimes called, the Dipolia[282]. The Bouphonia by the time of Aristophanes[283] was a symbol of what was archaic and obsolete. After the Just Logos in the Clouds has described the austere old educational régime of ancient Athens, the Unjust Logos remarks:

‘Bless me, that’s quite the ancient lot Dipolia-like, chock-full Of crickets and Bouphonia too.’

And the scholiast comments, ‘Dipolia, a festival at Athens, in which they sacrifice to Zeus Polieus, on the 14th day of Skirophorion. It is a mimetic representation of what happened about the cakes (πέλανοι) and the cows[284].’ What happened was this: ‘Barley mixed with wheat, or cakes made of them, was laid upon the bronze altar of Zeus Polieus, on the Acropolis. Oxen were driven round the altar, and the ox which went up to the altar and ate the offering on it was sacrificed. The axe and knife with which the beast was slain had been previously wetted with water, brought by maidens called “water-carriers.” The weapons were then sharpened and handed to the butchers, one of whom felled the ox with the axe and another cut its throat with the knife. As soon as he had felled the ox, the former threw the axe from him and fled, and the man who had cut the beast’s throat apparently imitated his example. Meantime the ox was skinned and all present partook of its flesh. Then the hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as if it were ploughing. A trial then took place in an ancient law court, presided over by the king (as he was called), to determine who had murdered the ox. The maidens who had brought the water accused the men who had sharpened the axe and knife, the men who had sharpened the axe and knife blamed the men who had handed these implements to the butchers, the men who had handed the implements to the butchers blamed the butchers and the butchers blamed the axe and knife, which were accordingly found guilty and condemned and cast into the sea.’

The remarks of the Unjust Logos are amply justified. That a mummery so absurd, with all its leisurely House-that-Jack-built hocus-pocus, should be regularly carried on in the centre of civilized Athens was enough to make the most careless and the most conventional reflect on the nature and strength of religious conservatism. But the rite was once of real and solemn import, and, taken as such, the heart of a terror-stricken service of Aversion. The ox had to be killed, man imperatively demanded his feast of flesh-meat, but it was a dreadful ἄγος, an abomination, to kill it, as bad as, perhaps worse than killing a man, and the ghost of the ox and the spirits of vengeance generally must at all costs be tricked or appeased. So great is the terror that no one device is enough. You pretend that the ox is not really dead, or at least that he has come to life: if that is not enough you pretend that he was himself an offender: he ate the sacred cakes, not by compulsion, but of his own free, wicked will. Last you pretend that you did not do it yourself, it was some one else. No, not some one else, but some_thing_ else. Finally that thing is got rid of; the ἄγος, the pollution, is thrown into the sea.

The important point for the moment is that the ox, though no surrogate for human sacrifice, is as good as human, is a man. His murdered ghost, or at least the pollution of his murder, cries for placation and purification. It is satisfactory to note that if you had to be purified yourself for murdering an ox, an ox, even a bronze ox, had to be purified for murdering you. Pausanias[285] was told the following story about a bronze ox, dedicated at Olympia by the Corcyreans. A little boy was sitting playing under the ox, and suddenly he lifted up his head and broke it against the bronze, and a few days after he died of the wounds. The Eleans consulted as to whether they should remove the ox out of the Altis, as being guilty of blood, but the Delphic oracle, always conservative in the matter of valuable property, ordained ‘that they were to leave it and perform the same ceremonies as were customary among the Greeks in the case of involuntary homicide.’

To return to the Bouphonia, the confused notion that a thing must be done, and yet that its doing involves an ἄγος, a pollution, comes out in all the rituals known as Flight-ceremonies. The gist of them is very clear in the account given by Diodorus[286] of the ceremonies of embalming among the Egyptians. He tells us ‘the man called He-who-slits-asunder (παρασχίστης) takes an Aethiopian stone, and, making a slit in the prescribed way, instantly makes off with a run, and they pursue him and pelt him with stones, and heap curses on him, as though transferring the pollution of the thing on to him.’

The Flight-Ceremony recorded by Plutarch[287] is specially instructive, and must be noted in detail, the more so as it, like the Bouphonia, is connected with rites of the threshing-floor. In his 12th Greek Question, Plutarch says that among the three great festivals celebrated every eighth year at Delphi was one called Stepterion[288], and in another discourse (De defect. orac. XIV.) he describes the rite practised, though he mixes it up with so much aetiological mythology that it is not very easy to disentangle the actual facts. This much is clear; every eighth year a hut (καλιάς) was set up about the threshing-floor at Delphi. This hut, Plutarch says, bore more resemblance to a kingly palace than to a snake’s lair; we may therefore safely infer that it held a snake. A boy with both his parents alive was led up by a certain prescribed way[289] with lighted torches; fire was set to the hut, a table overturned, and the celebrants took flight without looking back through the gates of the precinct; afterwards the boy went off to Tempe, fasted, dined, and was brought back crowned with laurel in solemn procession. Plutarch never says that the boy killed the snake, but as the ceremony was supposed to be a mimetic representation of the slaying of the Python and the banishment of Apollo, this may be inferred. Plutarch is of course more suo shocked at the idea that Apollo could need purification, and at a loss to account decently for the curious ceremonial, but he makes one acute remark: ‘finally the wanderings and the servitude of the boy and the purifications at Tempe raise a suspicion of some great pollution and deed of daring’ (μεγάλου τινὸς ἄγους καὶ τολμήματος ὑποψίαν ἔχουσι). This hits the mark: a sacred snake has been slain; the slayer has incurred an ἄγος, from which he must be purified. The slaying is probably formal and sacrificial, for the boy is led to the hut with all due solemnity, and has been carefully selected for the purpose; but the τόλμημα, the outrage, the deed of daring, is an ἄγος, so he must take flight after its accomplishment. Sacred snake, or sacred ox, or human victim, the procedure is the same.

* * * * *

To resume. The outcome of our examination of the ceremony of the pharmakos is briefly this: the gist of the pharmakos rite is physical purification, καθαρμός, and this notion, sometimes alone, sometimes combined with the notion of the placation of a ghost, is the idea underlying among the Greeks the notion we are apt to call Human Sacrifice. To this must be added the fact that in a primitive state of civilization the line between human and animal ‘sacrifice’ is not sharply drawn.

KALLYNTERIA, PLYNTERIA.

Plutarch[290] tells us that it was on a day of ill-omen that Alcibiades returned to Athens: ‘On the day of his return they were solemnizing the Plynteria to the Goddess. For on the 6th day of the third part of Thargelia the Praxiergidae solemnize the rites that may not be disclosed: they take off the adornments of the image, and cover it up. Hence the Athenians account this day as most unlucky of all, and do no work on it. And it seemed as though the Goddess were receiving him in no friendly or kindly fashion, as she hid her face from him and seemed to banish him from her presence.’ At the Plynteria, as at other ‘unlucky’ festivals, the sanctuaries, Pollux[291] tells us, were roped round. The object was in part to keep out the common herd, perhaps primarily to ‘avert’ evil influences.

Photius[292] discusses the two festivals, the Kallynteria and the Plynteria, together, placing the Kallynteria first; they have indeed practically always been bracketed in the minds of commentators as substantially identical in content. The Plynteria, it is usually stated, was the washing festival. The image of Pallas was taken in solemn procession down to the sea, stripped of its gear, veiled from the eyes of the vulgar, washed in sea-water, and brought back. At the Kallynteria it was re-dressed, re-decked, ‘beautified.’ This simple explanation of the sequence of rites presents only one trifling difficulty. Photius expressly tells us that the Kallynteria preceded the Plynteria; the Kallynteria took place on the 19th of the month Thargelion, and the Plynteria on the second day of the 3rd decade, i.e. on the 22nd[293]. It would be strange if the image was first ‘beautified’ and then washed. The explanation of the seeming incongruity is of course a simple one. The word καλλύνειν means not only ‘to beautify’ but to brush out, to sweep, ‘to give a shine to.’ The Greek for broom is καλλύντριον, also καλ<λ>υντρόν in Hesych. s.v. σαρόν; and καλλύσματα, if we may trust Hesychius[294], means sweepings (σάρματα). In a word the Kallynteria is a festival of what the Romans call everruncatio, the festival of ‘those who do the sweeping.’ They swept out the sacred places, made them as we say now-a-days ‘beautifully clean,’ and then, having done their sweeping first like good housewives, when the house was ready they washed the image and brought it back in new shining splendour.

It is evident that when we hear of sweeping out sanctuaries and washing an image we have come to a religious stage in which there is a definite god worshipped, and that god is conceived of as anthropomorphic. There may have been rites of the Thargelia, including the Pharmakos, i.e. the ceremony of the expulsion of evil, before there were any Kallynteria or Plynteria. Be this as it may, the Kallynteria and Plynteria throw light on the purport of the pharmakos, and emphasize the fact that all the cleansing, whether of image, sanctuary or people, was but a preliminary to the bringing in of the first-fruits.

This connection between first-fruits and purification explains a feature in the Plynteria that would otherwise remain obscure. In the procession that took place at the Plynteria, probably, though not quite certainly, the procession in which the image was taken down to the sea, Hesychius[295] tells us they carried a cake or mass of dried figs, which went by the name of Hegeteria. Hesychius is at no loss to account for the strange name. Figs were the first cultivated fruit of which man partook; the cake of figs is called Hegeteria because it ‘Led the Way’ in the matter of diet!

We may perhaps be allowed to suggest a possible alternative. May not the fig-cake be connected with the root of ἅγος rather than with ἄγω? Figs were used in purification. Is not the Hegeteria the fig-cake of purification? A necklace of figs was hung about the neck of the pharmakos, and the statues of the gods had sometimes a like adornment. Primitive man is apt to get a little confused as to cause and effect. He performs a rite of purification to protect his first-fruits; he comes to think the offering of those first-fruits is in itself a rite of purification.

As usual when we come to consider the analogous Roman festival the meaning of the rites practised is more baldly obvious. Plutarch[296] in his Roman Questions asks, ‘Why did not the Romans marry in the month of May?’ and for once he hits upon the right answer: ‘May it be that in this month they perform the greatest of purificatory ceremonies?’ What these purificatory ceremonies, these καθαρμοί, were, he tells us explicitly: ‘for at the present day they throw images from the bridge into the river, but in old times they used to throw human beings.’ We must here separate sharply the fact stated by Plutarch, the actual ritual that took place in his own day, from his conjecture about the past. We know images, puppets, were thrown from the bridge, we may conjecture, as Plutarch did, that they were the surrogates of human sacrifice, but we must carefully bear in mind that this is pure conjecture. The fact Plutarch certifies in another of his Questions[297], and adds the name of the puppets. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘is the reason that in the month of May they throw images of human beings from the wooden bridge into the river, calling them Argeioi?’ Ovid[298] tells us a little more: ‘Then (i.e. on May 15th) the Vestal is wont to throw from the oaken bridge the images of men of old times, made of rushes.’ He adds that it was in obedience to an oracle: ‘Ye nations, throw two bodies in sacrifice to the Ancient One who bears the sickle, bodies to be received by the Tuscan streams.’ Ovid and Plutarch clearly both held that the Argei of rushes were surrogates. It seems possible, on the other hand, that the myth of human sacrifice may have arisen from a merely dramatic apotropaic rite. The one certain thing is that the Argei[299] were pharmakoi, were καθάρματα.

That the time of the Argei, and indeed the whole month till the Ides of June, was unlucky is abundantly proved by the conduct of the Flaminica. Plutarch[300] goes on to say that the Flaminica is wont to be gloomy (σκυθρωπάζειν) and not to wash nor to adorn herself. Ovid[301] adds details of this mourning; he tells us that he consulted the Flaminica Dialis as to the marriage of his daughter, and learnt that till the Ides of June there was no luck for brides and their husbands, ‘for thus did the holy bride of the Dialis speak to me: “Until tranquil Tiber has borne to the sea in his tawny waters the cleansings from Ilian Vesta it is not lawful for me to comb my shorn locks with the boxwood, nor to pare my nails with iron, nor to touch my husband though he be priest of Jove.... Be not in haste. Better will thy daughter marry when Vesta of the Fire shines with a cleansed hearth.”’

The Roman Vestalia fell a little later than the Kallynteria and Plynteria, but their content is the same. I borrow the account of the ritual of the Vestalia from Mr Warde-Fowler[302]. On June 7 the penus, or innermost sanctuary of Vesta, which was shut all the rest of the year and to which no man but the pontifex maximus had at any time right of entry, was thrown open to all matrons. During the seven following days they crowded to it barefoot. The object of this was perhaps to pray for a blessing on the household. On plain and old-fashioned ware offerings of food were carried into the temple: the Vestals themselves offered the sacred cakes made of the first ears of corn, plucked as we saw in the early days of May; bakers and millers kept holiday, all mills were garlanded and donkeys decorated with wreaths and cakes. On June 15 the temple (aedes) was swept and the refuse taken away and either thrown into the Tiber or deposited in some particular spot. Then the dies nefasti came to an end, and the 15th itself became fastus as soon as the last act of cleansing had been duly performed. Quando stercus delatum fas, ‘When the rubbish has been carried away.’

Dr Frazer[303] has collected many savage parallels to the rites of the Vestalia. The most notable is the busk or festival of first-fruits among the Creek Indians of North America, held in July or August when the corn is ripe. Before the celebration of the busk no Indian would eat or even touch the new corn. In preparation for its rites they got new clothes and household utensils: old clothes, rubbish of all kinds, and the old corn that remained were carefully burnt. The village fires were put out and the ashes swept away, and in particular the hearth and altar of the temple were dug up and cleaned out. The public square was carefully swept out ‘for fear of polluting the first-fruit offerings.’ Before the sacramental eating of the new corn a strict fast was observed, and (for the precautions taken by the savage ritualist are searching and logical) a strong purgative was swallowed. With the new corn was solemnly dispensed the freshly-kindled fire, and the priest publicly announced that the new divine fire had purged away the sins of the past year. Such powerful ‘medicine’ was the new corn that some of the men rubbed their new corn between their hands, then on their faces and breasts.

To resume. In the Anthesteria we have seen that sacrifice was in intent purification, and that this purification took the form of the placation of ghosts. In the Thargelia, purification is again the end and aim of sacrifice, but this purification, though it involves the taking of a human life, is of the nature of a merely magical cleansing to prepare for the incoming first-fruits.

We pass to the consideration of the autumn festival of sowing, the Thesmophoria.

IV. THE WOMEN’S FESTIVALS

THESMOPHORIA, ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA, STENIA, HALOA.

‘τὰ θεσμοφόρι’ ἄγουσιν ὥσπερ καὶ πρὸ τοῦ.’

The Thesmophoria.

With the autumn festival of the Thesmophoria[304] we come to a class of rites of capital interest. They were practised by women only and were of immemorial antiquity. Although, for reasons explained at the outset, they are considered after the Anthesteria and Thargelia, their character was even more primitive, and, owing to the conservative character of women and the mixed contempt and superstition with which such rites were regarded by men, they were preserved in pristine purity down to late days. Unlike the Diasia, Anthesteria, Thargelia, they were left almost uncontaminated by Olympian usage, and—a point of supreme interest—under the influence of a new religious impulse, they issued at last in the most widely influential of all Greek ceremonials, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

To the primitive character and racial origin of these rites we have the witness of Herodotus[305], though unhappily piety sealed his lips as to details. He says, ‘Concerning the feast of Demeter which the Greeks call Thesmophoria I must preserve an auspicious silence, excepting in so far as every one may speak of it. It was the daughters of Danaus who introduced this rite from Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; but after the upset of the whole of Peloponnesos by the Dorians the rite died down completely, and it was only those of the Peloponnesians who were left, and the Arcadians who did not leave their seats who kept it up.’ Herodotus oddly enough does not mention the Athenians, who were as stable and as untouched as the Arcadians, but his notice is invaluable as fixing the pre-Dorian character of the rites. Knowing that they were of immemorial antiquity, more suo he attributes them to the Egyptians, and as will later be seen (p. 128) there may be some element of probability in his supposition.

The Thesmophoria, like the Anthesteria, was a three days’ festival. It was held from the 11th-13th of Pyanepsion (October-November); the first day, the 11th, was called both Kathodos and Anodos, Downgoing and Uprising, the second Nesteia, Fasting, and the third Kalligeneia, Fair-Born or Fair-Birth[306]. The meaning of the name Thesmophoria and the significance of the three several days will appear later: at present it is sufficient to note that the Thesmophoria collectively was a late autumn festival and certainly connected with sowing. Cornutus[307] says, ‘they fast in honour of Demeter ... when they celebrate her feast at the season of sowing.’ Of a portion of the ritual of the Thesmophoria we have an unusually detailed account preserved to us by a scholiast on the Hetairae of Lucian; and as this portion is, for the understanding of the whole festival, of capital importance it must at the outset be examined in detail. In the dialogue of Lucian, Myrto is reproaching Pamphilos for deserting her; ‘the girl,’ says Myrto, ‘you are going to marry is not good-looking; I saw her close at hand at the Thesmophoria with her mother.’ The notice is important as it has been asserted that the Thesmophoria was a festival of married women only, which, in Lucian’s time, was clearly not the case.

The scholiast[308] on the passage comments as follows, and ancient commentators have left us few commentaries more instructive: ‘The Thesmophoria, a festival of the Greeks, including mysteries, and these are called also Skirrophoria.’ According to the more mythological explanation they are celebrated in that Kore when she was gathering flowers was carried off by Plouton. At the time a certain Eubouleus, a swineherd, was feeding his swine on the spot and they were swallowed down with her in the chasm of Kore. Hence in honour of Eubouleus the swine are thrown into the chasms of Demeter and Kore. Certain women who have purified themselves for three days[309] and who bear the name of ‘Drawers up’ bring up the rotten portions of the swine that have been cast into the megara. And they descend into the inner sanctuaries and having brought up (the remains) they place them on the altars, and they hold that whoever takes of the remains and mixes it with his seed will have a good crop. And they say that in and about the chasms are snakes which consume the most part of what is thrown in; hence a rattling din is made when the women draw up the remains and when they replace the remains by those well-known (ἐκεῖνα) images, in order that the snakes which they hold to be the guardians of the sanctuaries may go away.

‘The same rites are called Arretophoria (carrying of things unnamed) and are performed with the same intent concerning the growth of crops and of human offspring. In the case of the Arretophoria, too, sacred things that may not be named and that are made of cereal paste, are carried about, i.e. images of snakes and of the forms of men[310]. They employ also fir-cones on account of the fertility of the tree, and into the sanctuaries called megara these are cast and also, as we have already said, swine—the swine, too, on account of their prolific character—in token of the growth of fruits and human beings, as a thank-offering to Demeter, inasmuch as she, by providing the grain called by her name, civilized the human race. The interpretation then of the festival given above is mythological, but the one we give now is physical. The name Thesmophoria is given because Demeter bears the title Thesmophoros, since she laid down a law or Thesmos in accordance with which it was incumbent on men to obtain and provide by labour their nurture.’

The main outline of the ritual, in spite of certain obscurities in the scholiast’s account, is clear. At some time not specified, but during the Thesmophoria, women, carefully purified for the purpose, let down pigs into clefts or chasms called μέγαρα or chambers. At some other time not precisely specified they descended into the megara, brought up the rotten flesh and placed it on certain altars, whence it was taken and mixed with seed to serve as a fertility charm. As the first day of the festival was called both Kathodos and Anodos it seems likely that the women went down and came up the same day, but as the flesh of the pigs was rotten some time must have elapsed. It is therefore conjectured that the flesh was left to rot for a whole year, and that the women on the first day took down the new pigs and brought up last year’s pigs.

How long the pigs were left to rot does not affect the general content of the festival. It is of more importance to note that the flesh seems to have been regarded as in some sort the due of the powers of the earth as represented by the guardian snakes. The flesh was wanted by men as a fertility charm, but the snakes it was thought might demand part of it; they were scared away, but to compensate for what they did not get, surrogates made of cereal paste had to be taken down. These paste surrogates were in the form of things specially fertile. It is not quite clear whether the pine-cones etc. or only the pigs were let down at the Thesmophoria as well as the Arrephoria, but as the scholiast is contending for the close analogy of both festivals this seems probable. It does not indeed much matter what the exact form of the sacra was: all were fertility charms.

The remarks of the scholiast about the double λόγος, i.e. the double rationale of the festival, are specially instructive. By his time, and indeed probably long before, educated people had ceased to believe that by burying a fertile animal or a fir-cone in the earth you could induce the earth to be fertile; they had advanced beyond the primitive logic of ‘sympathetic magic.’ But the Thesmophoria was still carried on by conservative womanhood:

‘They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.’

An origin less crude and revolting to common sense is required and promptly supplied by mythology[311]. Kore had been carried down into a cleft by Plouton: therefore in her memory the women went down and came up. Pigs had been swallowed down at the same time: therefore they took pigs with them. Such a mythological rationale was respectable if preposterous. The myth of the rape of Persephone of course really arose from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth. In the back of his mind the scholiast knows that the content of the ritual was ‘physical,’ the object the impulsion of nature. But even after he has given the true content his mind clouds over with modern associations. The festival, he says, is a ‘thank-offering’ to Demeter. But in the sympathetic magic of the Thesmophoria man attempts direct compulsion, he admits no mediator between himself and nature, and he thanks no god for what no god has done. A thank-offering is later even than a prayer, and prayer as yet is not. To mark the transition from rites of compulsion to rites of supplication and consequent thanksgiving is to read the whole religious history of primitive man.

Some details of the rites of the Thesmophoria remain to be noted. The Thesmophoria, though, thanks to Aristophanes, we know them best at Athens, were widespread throughout Greece. The ceremony of the pigs went on at Potniae in Boeotia. The passage in which Pausanias[312] describes it is most unfortunately corrupt; but he adds one certain detail, that the pigs there used were new-born, sucking pigs (ὗς τῶν νεογνῶν). Among nations more savage than the Greeks a real Kore took the place of the Greek sucking pig or rather reinforced it. Among the Khonds, as Mr Andrew Lang[313] has pointed out, pigs and a woman are sacrificed that the land may be fertilized by their blood; the Pawnees of North America, down to the middle of the present century, sacrificed a girl obtained by preference from the alien tribe of the Sioux, but among the Greeks there is no evidence that the pigs were surrogates.

The megara themselves are of some importance; the name still survives in the modern Greek form Megara. Megara appear to have been natural clefts or chasms helped out later by art. As such they were at first the natural places for rites intended to compel the earth; later they became definite sanctuaries of earth divinities. In America, according to Mr Lang’s account, Gypsies, Pawnees, and Shawnees bury the sacrifices they make to the Earth Goddess in the earth, in natural crevices or artificial crypts. In the sanctuary of Demeter, at Cnidos, Sir Charles Newton[314] found a crypt which had originally been circular and later had been compressed by earthquake. Among the contents were bones of pigs and other animals, and the marble pigs which now stand near the Demeter of Cnidos in the British Museum. It is of importance to note that Porphyry[315], in his Cave of the Nymphs, says, that for the Olympian gods are set up temples and images and altars (βωμούς), for the chthonic gods and heroes hearths (ἐσχάραι), for those below the earth (ὑποχθονίοις) there are trenches and megara. Philostratos[316], in his Life of Apollonius, says, ‘The chthonic gods welcome trenches and ceremonies done in the hollow earth.’

Eustathius[317] says that megara are ‘underground dwellings of the two goddesses,’ i.e. Demeter and Persephone, and he adds that ‘Aelian says the word is μάγαρον not μέγαρον and that it is the place in which the mystical sacred objects are placed.’ Unless this suggestion is adopted the etymology of the word remains obscure[318]. The word itself, meaning at first a cave-dwelling, lived on in the megaron of kings’ palaces and the temples of Olympian gods, and the shift of meaning marks the transition from under to upper-world rites.

Art has left us no certain representation of the Thesmophoria; but in the charming little vase-painting from a lekythos in the National Museum at Athens[319], a woman is represented sacrificing a pig. He is obviously held over a trench and the three planted torches indicate an underworld service. In her left hand the woman holds a basket, no doubt containing sacra. There seems a reminiscence of the rites of the Thesmophoria, though we cannot say that they are actually represented.

* * * * *

It is practically certain that the ceremonies of the burying and resurrection of the pigs took place on the first day of the Thesmophoria called variously the Kathodos and the Anodos. It is further probable from the name Kalligeneia, Fairborn, that on the third day took place the strewing of the rotten flesh on the fields. The second, intervening day, also called μέση, the middle day, was a solemn fast, Nesteia; probably on this day the magical sacra lay upon the altars where the women placed them. The strictness of this fast made it proverbial. On this day prisoners were released, the law courts were closed, the Boule could not meet[320]. Athenaeus mentions the fast when he is discussing different kinds of fish. One of the Cynics comes in and says: ‘My friends too are keeping a fast as if this were the middle day of the Thesmophoria since we are feasting like cestreis’; the cestreus being non-carnivorous.

The women fasted sitting on the ground, and hence arose the aetiological myth that Demeter herself, the desolate mother, fasted sitting on the ‘Smileless Stone.’ Apollodorus[321], in recounting the sorrows of Demeter, says: ‘and first she sat down on the stone that is called after her “Smileless” by the side of the “Well of Fair Dances.”’ The ‘Well of Fair Dances’ has come to light at Eleusis, and there, too, was found a curious monument[322] which shows how the Eleusinians made the goddess in their own image. In fig. 12 we have a votive relief of the usual type, a procession of worshippers bearing offerings to a seated goddess. But the goddess is not seated goddess-fashion on a throne; she is the Earth mother, and she crouches as the fasting women crouched on her own earth.

A passage in which Plutarch speaks of the women fasting is of great importance for the understanding of the general gist of the festival. In the discourse on Isis and Osiris[323] he is struck by the general analogy of certain agricultural ceremonies in Egypt and Greece, and makes the following instructive remarks: ‘How are we to deal with sacrifices of a gloomy, joyless and melancholy character if it be not well either to omit traditional ceremonies, or to upset our views about the gods or confuse them by preposterous conjectures? And among the Greeks also many analogous things take place about the same time of the year as that in which the Egyptians perform their sacred ceremonies, e.g. at Athens the women fast at the Thesmophoria seated on the ground, and the Boeotians stir up the megara of Achaia, calling that festival grievous (ἐπαχθῆ), inasmuch as Demeter was in grief (ἐν ἄχει), on account of the descent of her daughter. And that month about the rising of the Pleiades is the month of sowing which the Egyptians call Athor, and the Athenians Pyanepsion (bean month), and the Boeotians Damatrion. And Theopompos relates that those who dwell towards the West account and call the Winter Kronos, and the Summer Aphrodite, and the Spring Persephone, and from Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their birth. And the Phrygians think that in the Winter the god is asleep, and that in the Summer he is awake, and they celebrate to him revels which in winter are Goings-to-sleep and in summer Wakings-up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in winter the god is bound down and imprisoned, and in spring aroused and set free again.’

Whatever be the meaning of the difficult Achaia[324] Plutarch has hit upon the truth. Common to all the peoples bordering on the Aegean and, had he known it, to many another primitive race, were ceremonies of which the gist was pantomime, the mimicking of nature’s processes, in a word the ritual of sympathetic magic. The women fasted seated on the ground because the earth was desolate; they rose and revelled, they stirred the megara to mimic the impulse of spring. Then when they knew no longer why they did these things they made a goddess their protagonist.

Plutarch[325] has made for himself in his own image his ‘ideal’ Greek gods, serene, cheerful, beneficent; but he is a close observer of facts, and he sees there are ceremonies—‘sacrifices’ (θυσίαι) in his late fashion he calls them—which are ‘mournful,’ ‘gloomy,’ ‘smileless.’ Who and what are these gods who demand fasting and lamentation? He must either blink the facts of acknowledged authorized ritual—this he cannot and will not do, for he is an honest man—or he must confuse and confound his conceptions of godhead. Caught on the horns of this dilemma he betakes himself to comparative anthropology and notes analogies among adjacent and more primitive peoples.

Of two other elements in the Thesmophoria we have brief notice from the lexicographers. Hesychius[326] says of the word δίωγμα (pursuit), ‘a sacrifice at Athens, performed in secret by the women at the Thesmophoria. The same was later called ἀποδίωγμα.’ From Suidas[327] we learn that it was also called Χαλκιδικὸν δίωγμα, the ‘Chalcidian pursuit,’ and Suidas of course gives a historical explanation. Only one thing is clear, that the ceremony must have belonged to the general class of ‘pursuit’ rituals which have already been discussed in relation to the Thargelia.

The remaining ceremony is known to us only from Hesychius[328]. He says, ‘ζημία (penalty), a sacrifice offered on account of the things done at the Thesmophoria.’

Of the Thesmophoria as celebrated at Eretria we are told two characteristic particulars. Plutarch, in his Greek Questions[329], asks, ‘Why in the Thesmophoria do the Eretrian women cook their meat not by fire but by the sun, and why do they not invoke Kalligeneia?’ The solutions suggested by Plutarch for these difficulties are not happy. The use of the sun in place of fire is probably a primitive trait; in Greece to-day it is not difficult to cook a piece of meat to a palatable point on a stone by the rays of the burning midday sun, and in early days the practice was probably common enough; it might easily be retained in an archaic ritual. Kalligeneia also presents no serious difficulty, the word means ‘fair-born’ or ‘fair-birth.’ It may be conjectured that the reference was at first to the good crop produced by the rotten pigs’ flesh. With the growth of anthropomorphism the ‘good crop’ would take shape as Kore the ‘fair-born,’ daughter of earth. Of such developments more will be said when we discuss (p. 276) the general question of ‘the making of a goddess.’ A conservative people such as the Eretrians seem to have been would be slow to adopt any such anthropomorphic development.

Another particular as regards the Thesmophoria generally is preserved for us by Aelian in his History of Animals[330]; speaking of the plant Agnos (the Agnus castus), he says, ‘In the Thesmophoria the Attic women used to strew it on their couches and it (the Agnos) is accounted hostile to reptiles.’ He goes on to say that the plant was primarily used to keep off snakes, to the attacks of which the women in their temporary booths would be specially exposed. Then as it was an actual preventive of one evil it became a magical purity charm. Hence its name.

The pollution of death, like marriage, was sufficient to exclude the women of the house from keeping the Thesmophoria. Athenaeus[331] tells us that Democritus of Abdera, wearied of his extreme old age, was minded to put an end to himself by refusing all food; but the women of his house implored him to live on till the Thesmophoria was over in order that they might be able to keep the festival; so he obligingly kept himself alive on a pot of honey.

An important and easily intelligible particular is noted by Isaeus[332] in his oration About the Estate of Pyrrhos. The question comes up, ‘Was Pyrrhos lawfully married?’ Isaeus asks, ‘If he were married, would he not have been obliged, on behalf of his lawful wife, to feast the women at the Thesmophoria and to perform all the other customary dues in his deme on behalf of his wife, his property being what it was?’ This is one of the passages on which the theory has been based that the Thesmophoria was a rite performed by married women only. It really points the other way; a man when he married by thus obtaining exclusive rights over one woman violated the old matriarchal usages and may have had to make his peace with the community by paying the expenses of the Thesmophoria feast.

Before passing to the consideration of the etymology and precise meaning of the word Thesmophoria, the other women festivals must be briefly noted, i.e. the Arrephoria or Arretophoria, the Skirophoria or Skira, and the Stenia.

ARREPHORIA, SKIROPHORIA, STENIA.

The scholiast on Lucian, as we have already seen, expressly notes that the Arretophoria and Skirophoria were of similar content with the Thesmophoria. Clement of Alexandria[333], a dispassionate witness, confirms this view. ‘Do you wish,’ he asks, ‘that I should recount for you the Flower-gatherings of Pherephatta and the basket, and the rape by Aïdoneus, and the cleft of the earth, and the swine of Eubouleus, swallowed down with the goddesses, on which account in the Thesmophoria they cast down living swine in the megara? This piece of mythology the women in their festivals celebrate in diverse fashion in the city, dramatizing the rape of Pherephatta in diverse fashion in the Thesmophoria, the Skirophoria, the Arretophoria.’

The Arretophoria or Arrephoria was apparently the Thesmophoria of the unmarried girl. Its particular ritual is fairly well known to us from the account of Pausanias. Immediately after his examination of the temple of Athene Polias on the Athenian Acropolis, Pausanias[334] comes to the temple of Pandrosos, ‘who alone of the sisters was blameless in regard to the trust committed to them’: he then adds, ‘what surprised me very much, but is not generally known, I will describe as it takes place. Two maidens dwell not far from the temple of Polias: the Athenians call them Arrephoroi, they are lodged for a time with the goddess, but when the festival comes round they perform the following ceremony by night. They put on their heads the things which the priestess of Athena gives them to carry, but what it is she gives is known neither to her who gives nor to them who carry. Now there is in the city an enclosure not far from the sanctuary of Aphrodite, called Aphrodite in the Gardens, and there is a natural underground descent through it. Down this way the maidens go. Below they leave their burdens, and getting something else which is wrapt up, they bring it back. These maidens are then discharged and others brought to the Acropolis in their stead[335].’

From other sources some further details, for the most part insignificant, are known. The girls were of noble family, they were four in number and had to be between the ages of seven and eleven, and were chosen by the Archon Basileus. They wore white robes and gold ornaments. To two of their number was entrusted the task of beginning the weaving of the peplos of Athene. Special cakes called ἀνάστατοι were provided for them, but whether to eat or to carry as sacra does not appear. It is more important to note that the service of the Arrephoroi was not confined to Athene and Pandrosos[336]. There was an Errephoros (sic) to Demeter and Proserpine[337], and there were Hersephoroi (sic) of ‘Earth with the title of Themis’ and of ‘Eileithyia in Agrae[338].’ Probably any primitive woman goddess could have Arrephoria.

Much is obscure in the account of Pausanias; we do not know what the precinct was to which the maidens went, nor where it was. It is possible that Pausanias confused the later sanctuary of Aphrodite (in the gardens) with the earlier sanctuary of the goddess close to the entrance of the Acropolis. One thing, however, emerges clearly, the main gist of the ceremonial was the carrying of unknown sacra. In this respect we are justified in holding with Clement that the Arrephoria (held in Skirophorion, June-July) was a parallel to the Thesmophoria.

It is possible, I think, to go a step further. A rite frequently throws light on the myth made to explain it. Occasionally the rite itself is elucidated by the myth to which it gave birth. The maidens who carried the sacred cista were too young to know its holy contents, but they might be curious, so a scare story was invented for their safeguarding, the story of the disobedient sisters who opened the chest, and in horror at the great snake they found there, threw themselves headlong from the Acropolis. The myth is prettily represented on an amphora in the British Museum[339], reproduced in fig. 13. The sacred chest stands on rude piled stones that represent the rock of the Acropolis, the child rises up with outstretched hand, Athene looks on in dismay and anger, and the bad sisters hurry away. Erichthonios is here a human child with two great snakes for guardians, but what the sisters really found, what the maidens really carried, was a snake[340] and symbols like a snake. Snake and child to the primitive mind are not far asunder; the Greek peasant of to-day has his child quickly baptized, for till baptized he may at any moment disappear in the form of a snake. The natural form for a human hero to assume is, as will later be seen, a snake.

The little girl-Arrephoroi in ignorance, as became their age, carried the same sacra as the full-grown women in the Thesmophoria. The perfect seemliness and reverence of the rite is shown by the careful precautions taken. When goddesses began to take shape the sacra were regarded, not as mere magical charms, but as offerings as was meet to Ge, to Themis, to Aphrodite, to Eileithyia, but always the carrying was a reverent ‘mystery.’

* * * * *

The Skira or Skirophoria[341] presents more difficulties. It was specially closely associated with the Thesmophoria of which it may have formed part. The chorus in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes[342] says, ‘If any of us bear a good citizen to the state, a taxiarch or strategos, she ought to be rewarded by some honourable office, the presidency ought to be given her at the Stenia and the Skira and at any other of the feasts which we (women) celebrate.’ The scholiast remarks, ‘both were feasts of women; the Stenia took place before the two days of the Thesmophoria on the 7th of Pyanepsion, and the Skira, some say, are the sacred rites that took place on this feast (i.e. the Thesmophoria) to Demeter and Kore. But others say that sacrifice was made ἐπὶ Σκίρῳ to Athene.’ On the other hand in an inscription, usually a most trustworthy authority, the two ceremonies are noted as separate though apparently analogous. In the inscription in question[343] which is of the 4th century B.C., certain regulations are enforced ‘when the feast of the Thesmophoria takes place, and at the Plerosia, and at the Kalamaia and the Skira, and if there is any other day on which the women congregate by ancestral usage.’

The ancients themselves had raised the question whether the Skira were sacred to Athene or to Demeter and Kore. This question is not really relevant to our enquiry; Athene, as will be seen later, when the ‘making of a goddess’ is discussed, is simply ἡ Ἀθηναία κόρη, the κόρη, the maiden of Athens, and any festival of any Kore—any maiden—would early attach itself to her.

More important is the question, What does the word σκίρα mean? Two solutions are offered. The scholiast on Aristophanes[344] says σκίρον means the same as σκιάδειον, umbrella, and the feast and the month took that name from the fact that at a festival of Demeter and Kore on the 12th of Skirophorion, the priest of Erechtheus carried a white umbrella. A white umbrella is a slender foundation for a festival, but the element of white points in the right direction. The scholiast on the Wasps of Aristophanes[345] commenting on σκῖρον has a happier thought: he says a certain sort of white earth, like gypsum, is called σκιρράς, and Athene is called Σκιρράς inasmuch as she is daubed with white, from a similarity in the name.

The same notion of white earth appears in the notice of the Etymologicon Magnum on the month Skirophorion, ‘the name of a month among the Athenians; it is so called from the fact that in it Theseus carried σκίραν by which is meant gypsum. For Theseus, coming from the Minotaur, made an Athene of gypsum, and carried it and as he made it in this month it is called Skirophorion.’

But, it will be asked, supposing it be granted that Skira means things made of gypsum and Skirophoria the carrying of such things, what, in the name of common sense, has this to do with a festival of women analogous to the Thesmophoria? Dr A. Mommsen[346], who first emphasized this etymology, proposes that the white earth was used as manure; this, though possible and ingenious, seems scarcely satisfactory. I would suggest another connection. The scholiast on Lucian has told us that the surrogates deposited in the megara were shaped out of paste made of grain. Is it not possible that the Σκίρα were such surrogates made of gypsum alone or part gypsum, part flour-paste? That such a mixture was manufactured for food we learn from Pliny[347]. In discussing the preparation of alica from zea (spelt) he says, ‘astonishing statement, it is mixed with chalk.’ In the case of a coarse sort of zea from Africa, the mixture was made in the proportion of a quarter of gypsum to three of zea. If this suggestion be correct, the Skirophoria is simply a summer Thesmophoria.

If the Skirophoria must, all said, remain conjectural, the gist of the Stenia is clear and was understood by the ancients themselves. Photius remarks on Stenia—‘a festival at Athens in which the Anodos of Demeter is held to take place. At this festival, according to Euboulos, the women abuse each other by night.’ Hesychius[348] explains in like fashion and adds: στηνιῶσαι, ‘to use bad language,’ ‘to abuse.’ According to him they not only abused each other but ‘made scurrilous jests.’ Such abuse, we know from Aristophanes[349], was a regular element of the licence of the Thesmophoria. The Gephyrismoi, the jokes at the bridge, of the Eleusinian Mysteries, will occur to every one: similar in content is the stone-throwing, the Lithobolia of Damia and Auxesia.

It is interesting to note that in the primitive festivals of the Romans, the same scurrility contests appear. At the ancient feast of the Nonae Capratinae, Plutarch[350] tells us, ‘the women are feasted in the fields in booths made of fig-tree branches, and the servant-maids run about and play; afterwards they come to blows and throw stones at one another.’ The servant-maids represent here as elsewhere a primitive subject population; they live during the festival in booths as the women did at the Thesmophoria. How precisely this fight and this scurrility serve the end proposed, the promotion of fertility, is not wholly clear, but the throwing of stones, the beating and fighting, all look like the expulsion of evil influences. The scurrilous and sometimes to our modern thinking unseemly gestures savour of sympathetic magic, an intent that comes out clearly in the festival of the Haloa, the discussion of which must be reserved to the end.

* * * * *

We come next to the all-absorbing question, What is the derivation, the real root-meaning of the term Thesmophoria and the title Thesmophoros? The orthodox explanation of the Thesmophoria is that it was the festival of Demeter Thesmophoros, the law-carrier or law-giver. With Demeter, it is said, came in agriculture, settled life, marriage and the beginnings of civilized law. This is the view held by the scholiast on Theocritus[351]. In commenting on various sacred plants, which promoted chastity, he adds, ‘It was a law among the Athenians that they should celebrate the Thesmophoria yearly, and the Thesmophoria is this: women who are virgins and have lived a holy life, on the day of the feast, place certain customary and holy books on their heads, and as though to perform a liturgy they go to Eleusis.’

The scholiast gives himself away by the mention of Eleusis. He confuses the two festivals in instructive fashion, and clearly is reconstructing a ritual out of a cultus epithet. Happily we know from the other and better informed scholiast[352] that the women carried at the Thesmophoria not books but pigs. How then came the pigs and other sacra to be Thesmoi? Dr Frazer proposes a solution. He suggests that the sacra, including the pigs, were called θεσμοί, because they were ‘the things laid down.’ The women were called Thesmophoroi because they carried ‘the things laid down’; the goddess took her name from her ministrants.

This interpretation is a great advance on the derivation from Thesmophoros, Law-giver. Thesmophoros is scarcely the natural form for law-giver, which in ordinary Greek appears as Thesmothetes. Moreover the form Thesmophoros must be connected with actual carrying and must also be connected with what we know was carried at the Thesmophoria. But Thesmoi in Greek did certainly mean laws, and Demeter Thesmophoros was in common parlance supposed to be Law-giver. What we want is a derivation that will combine both factors, the notion of law as well as the carrying of pigs.

In the light of Dr Verrall’s new explanation of Anthesteria (p. 48) such a derivation may be found. If the Anthesteria be the festival of the charming up, the magical revocation of souls, may not the Thesmophoria be the festival of the carrying of the magical sacra? To regard the θεσμοί, whether they are pigs or laws, as simply ‘things laid down,’ deriving them from the root θε, has always seemed to me somewhat frigid. The root θεσ is more vivid and has the blood of religion, or rather magic, in its veins. Although it came, when man entered into orderly and civilized relations with his god, to mean ‘pray,’ in earlier days it carried a wider connotation, and meant, I think, to perform any kind of magical ceremonies. Is not θέσκελος alive with magic?

THE CURSE AND THE LAW.

But what has law, sober law, to do with magic? To primitive man, it seems, everything. Magic is for cursing or for blessing, and in primitive codes it would seem there was no commandment without cursing. The curse, the ἀρά, is of the essence of the law. The breaker of the law is laid under a ban. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ was the first commandment ‘with promise.’ Law in fact began at a time long before the schism of Church and State, or even of Religion and Morality. There was then no such thing as ‘civil’ law. Nay more, it began in the dim days when religion itself had not yet emerged from magic, in the days when, without invoking the wrath of a righteous divinity, you could yet ‘put a curse’ upon a man, bind him to do his duty by magic and spells.

Primitive man, who thought he could constrain the earth to be fertile by burying in it fertile objects, by ‘sympathetic magic,’ was sure to think he could in like fashion compel his fellow. Curse tablets deposited in graves and sanctuaries have come to light in thousands; but before man learnt to write his curse, to spell out the formulary καταδῶ, ‘I bind you down,’ he had a simpler and more certain plan. In a grave in Attica was found a little lead figure[353] which tells its own tale. It is too ugly for needless reproduction, but it takes us into the very heart of ancient malignant magic. The head of the figure has been wrenched off, both arms are tightly swathed behind the back, and the legs in like fashion; right through the centre of the body has been driven a great nail. Dr Wünsch[354], in publishing the figure, compares the story recorded of a certain St Theophilos[355] ‘who had his feet and hands bound by magic.’ The saint sought relief in vain, till he was told in a dream to go out fishing, and what the fishermen drew up would cure him of his malady. They let down the net and drew up a bronze figure, bound hand and foot and with a nail driven through the hand: they drew out the nail and the saint immediately recovered.

The locus classicus on ancient magic and spells is of course the second Idyll of Theocritus[356], on Simaetha the magician. Part of her incantation may be quoted here because a poet’s insight has divined the strange fierce loveliness that lurks in rites of ignorance and fear, rites stark and desperate and non-moral as the passion that prompts them.

Delphis has forsaken her, and in the moonlight by the sea Simaetha makes ready her magic gear:

‘Lo! Now the barley smoulders in the flame. Thestylis, wretch! thy wits are woolgathering! Am I a laughing-stock to thee, a Shame? Scatter the grain, I say, the while we sing, “The bones of Delphis I am scattering.” Bird[357], magic Bird, draw the man home to me.

Delphis sore troubled me. I, in my turn, This laurel against Delphis will I burn. It crackles loud, and sudden down doth die, So may the bones of Delphis liquefy. Wheel, magic Wheel, draw the man home to me.

Next do I burn this wax, God helping me, So may the heart of Delphis melted be. This brazen wheel I whirl, so, as before Restless may he be whirled about my door. Bird, magic Bird, draw the man home to me.

Next will I burn these husks. O Artemis, Hast power hell’s adamant to shatter down And every stubborn thing. Hark! Thestylis, Hecate’s hounds are baying up the town, The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong.

... Lo, now the sea is still. The winds are still. The ache within my heart is never still.’

The incantations of Simaetha are of course a private rite to an individual end. That the practice of such rites was very frequent long before the decadent days of Theocritus is clear from the fact that Plato[358] in the Laws regards it as just as necessary that his ideal state should make enactments against the man who tries to slay or injure another by magic, as against him who actually does definite physical damage. His discussion of the two kinds of evil-doing is curious and instructive, both as indicating the prevalence of sorcery in his days, and as expressing the rather dubious attitude of his own mind towards such practices. ‘There are two kinds of poisoning in use among men, the nature of which forbids any clear distinction between them. There is the kind of which we have just now spoken, and which is the injury of one body by another in a natural and normal way, but the other kind injures by sorceries and incantations and magical bindings as they are called (καταδέσεσι), and this class induces the aggressors to injure others as much as is possible, and persuades the sufferers that they more than any other are liable to be damaged by this power of magic. Now it is not easy to know the whole truth about such matters, nor if one knows it is one likely to be able lightly to persuade others. When therefore men secretly suspect each other at the sight of, say, waxen images fixed either at their doors or at the crossways or at the tombs of their parents, it is no good telling them to make light of such things because they know nothing certain about them.’ Evidently Plato is not quite certain as to whether there is something in witchcraft or not: a diviner or a prophet, he goes on to admit, may really know something about these secret arts. Anyhow, he is clear that they are deleterious and should be stamped out if possible, and accordingly, any one who injures another either by magical bindings (καταδέσεσιν) or by magical inductions (ἐπαγωγαῖς) or by incantations (ἐπῳδαῖς) or by another form of magic is to die.

The scholiast[359] on the Idyll of Theocritus just quoted knows that one at least of the magical practices of Simaetha was also part of public ritual:

‘The goddess at the crossways. Clash the gong.’

Hecate is magically induced, yet her coming is feared. The clash of the bronze gong is apotropaic. The scholiast says that ‘they sound the bronze at eclipses of the moon ... because it has power to purify and to drive off pollutions. Hence, as Apollodorus states in his treatise Concerning the Gods, bronze was used for all purposes of consecration and purgation.’ Apollodorus also stated that ‘at Athens, the Hierophant of her who had the title of Kore sounded what was called a gong.’ It was also the custom ‘to beat on a cauldron when the king of the Spartans died.’ All the ceremonies noted, relating to eclipses, to Kore and to the death of the Spartan king, are on public occasions, and all are apotropaic, directed against ghosts and sprites. Metal in early days, when it is a novelty, is apt to be magical. The din (κρότος) made by the women when they took down the sacra, whether it was a clapping of hands or of metal, is of the same order. The snakes are feared as hostile demons. These apotropaic rites are not practised against the Olympians, against Zeus and Apollo, but against sprites and ghosts and the divinities of the underworld, against Kore and Hecate. These underworld beings were at first dreaded and exorcised, then as a gentler theology prevailed, men thought better of their gods, and ceased to exorcise them as demons, and erected them into a class of ‘spiritual beings who preside over curses.’ Pollux[360] has a brief notice of such divinities. He says ‘those who resolve curses are called “Protectors from evil spirits,” Who-send-away, Averters, Loosers, Putters-to-flight; those who impose curses are called gods or goddesses of Vengeance, Gods of Appeal, Exactors.’ The many adjectival titles are but so many descriptive names for the ghost that cries for vengeance.

The ‘curse that binds,’ the κατάδεσμος, throws light on another element that went to the making of the ancient notion of sacrifice. The formula[361] in cursing was sometimes καταδῶ ‘I bind down,’ but it was also sometimes παραδίδωμι ‘I give over.’ The person cursed or bound down was in some sense a gift or sacrifice to the gods of cursing, the underworld gods: the man stained by blood is ‘consecrate’ (καθιερωμένος) to the Erinyes. In the little sanctuary of Demeter at Cnidos[362] the curse takes even more religious form. He or she dedicates (ἀνιεροῖ), or offers as a votive offering (ἀνατίθημι, for ἀνατίθησι), and finally we have the familiar ἀνάθεμα of St Paul. Here the services of cursing, the rites of magic and the underworld are half way to the service of ‘tendance,’ the service of the Olympians, and we begin to understand why, in later writers, the pharmakos and other ‘purifications’ are spoken of as θυσίαι. It is one of those shifts so unhappily common to the religious mind. Man wants to gain his own ends, to gratify his own malign passion, but he would like to kill two birds with one stone, and as the gods are made in his own image, the feat presents no great difficulty. Later as he grows gentler himself, he learns to pray only ‘good prayers,’ bonas preces[363].

The curse (ἀρά) on its religious side developed into the vow[364] and the prayer (εὐχή), on its social side into the ordinance (θεσμός) and ultimately into the regular law (νόμος); hence the language of early legal formularies still maintains as necessary and integral the sanction of the curse. The formula is not ‘do this’ or ‘do not do that,’ but ‘cursed be he who does this, or does not do that.’

One instance may be selected, the inscription characteristically known as ‘the Dirae of Teos[365].’ The whole is too long to be transcribed, a few lines must suffice.

‘Whosoever maketh baneful drugs against the Teans, whether against individuals or the whole people:

‘May he perish, both he and his offspring.

‘Whosoever hinders corn from being brought into the land of the Teans, either by art or machination, whether by land or sea, and whosoever drives out what has been brought in:

‘May he perish, both he and his offspring.’

So clause after clause comes the refrain of cursing, like the tolling of a bell, and at last as though they could not have their fill, comes the curse on the magistrate who fails to curse:

‘Whosoever of them that hold office doth not make this cursing, what time he presides over the contest at the Anthesteria and the Herakleia and the Dia, let him be bound by an overcurse (ἐν τῇ ἐπάρῃ ἔχεσθαι), and whoever either breaks the stelae on which the cursing is written, or cuts out the letters or makes them illegible:

‘May he perish, both he and his offspring.’

It is interesting to find here that the curses were recited at the Anthesteria, a festival of ghosts, and the Herakleia, an obvious hero festival, and at the Dia—this last surely a festival of imprecation like the Diasia.

On the strength of these Dirae of Teos, recited at public and primitive festivals, it might not be rash to conjecture that at the Thesmophoria some form of θεσμοί or binding spells was recited as well as carried. This conjecture becomes almost a certainty when we examine an important inscription[366] found near Pergamos and dealing with the regulations for mourning in the city of Gambreion in Mysia. The mourning laws of the ancients bore harder on women than on men, a fact explicable not by the general lugubriousness of women, nor even by their supposed keener sense of convention, but by those early matriarchal conditions in which relationship naturally counted through the mother rather than the father. Women, the law in question enacts, are to wear dark garments; men if they ‘did not wish to do this’ might relax into white; the period of mourning is longer for women than for men. Next follows the important clause: ‘the official who superintends the affairs of women, who has been chosen by the people at the purifications that take place before the Thesmophoria, is to invoke blessings on the men who abide by the law and the women who obey the law that they may happily enjoy the goods they possess, but on the men who do not obey and the women who do not abide therein he is to invoke the contrary, and such women are to be accounted impious, and it is not lawful for them to make any sacrifice to the gods for the space of ten years, and the steward is to write up this law on two stelae and set them up, the one before the doors of the Thesmophorion, the other before the temple of Artemis Lochia.’

From the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes we learn almost nothing of the ritual of the Thesmophoria, save the fact that the feast was celebrated on the Pnyx[367]: but the fashion in which the woman-herald prays is worth noting; she begins by a real prayer[368]:

‘I bid you pray to Gods and Goddesses That in Olympus and in Pytho dwell And Delos, and to all the other gods.’

But when she comes to what she really cares about, she breaks into the old habitual curse formularies:

‘If any plots against the cause of Woman Or peace proposes to Euripides Or to the Medes, or plots a tyranny, Or if a female slave in her master’s ear Tells tales, or male or female publican Scants the full measure of our legal pint— Curse him that he may miserably perish, He and his house,—but for the rest of you Pray that the gods may give you all good things.’

It is of interest to find that not only were official curses written up at the doors of a Thesmophorion, but, at Syracuse, an oath of special sanctity ‘the great oath’ was taken there. Plutarch[369] tells us that when Callippus was conspiring against his friend Dion, the wife and sister of Dion became suspicious. To allay their suspicions, Callippus offered to give any pledge of his sincerity they might desire. They demanded that he should take ‘the great oath’ (ὀμόσαι τὸν μέγαν ὅρκον). ‘Now the great oath was after this wise. The man who gives this pledge has to go to the temenos of the Thesmophoroi, and after the performance of certain sacred ceremonies, he puts on him the purple robe of the goddess, and taking a burning torch he denies the charge on oath’ (ἀπόμνυσι). It is clear that this ‘great oath’ was some form of imprecation on the oath-taker, who probably by putting on the robe, dedicated himself in case of perjury to the goddess of the underworld. That the goddess was Kore we know from the fact that Callippus eventually forswore himself in sacrilegious fashion by sacrificing his victim on the feast of the Koreia, ‘the feast of the goddess by whom he had sworn.’ The curse is the dedication or devotion of others; the oath, like its more concrete form the ordeal, is the dedication of the curser himself.

The connection between primitive law and agriculture seems to have been very close. The name of the earliest laws recorded—they are rather precepts than in our sense laws—the ‘Ploughman’s Curses’ speaks for itself. Some of these Ploughman’s Curses are recorded. We are told by one of the ‘Writers of Proverbs[370]’ that ‘the Bouzyges at Athens, who performs the sacred ploughing, utters many other curses and also curses those who do not share water and fire as a means of subsistence and those who do not show the way to those who have lost it.’ Other similar precepts, no doubt sanctioned by similar curses, have come down to us under the name of the Thrice-Plougher Triptolemos[371], the first lawgiver of the Athenians. He bade men ‘honour their parents, rejoice the gods with the fruits of the earth and not injure animals.’ Perhaps these were to the Greeks the first commandments ‘with promise.’

Such are the primitive precepts that grow up in a community which agriculture has begun to bind together with the ties of civilized life. In the days before curses were graven in stone and perhaps for long after, it was well that when the people were gathered together for sowing or for harvest, these salutary curses should be recited. Amid the decay of so much that is robust and primitive, it is pleasant to remember that in the Commination Service of our own Anglican Church with its string of holy curses annually recited

‘They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.’

THE HALOA.

The consideration of the Haloa has been purposely reserved to the end for this reason. The rites of the Thesmophoria, Skirophoria and Arrephoria are carried on by women only, and when they come to be associated with divinities at all, they are regarded as ‘sacred to’ Demeter and Kore or to analogous women goddesses Ge, Aphrodite, Eileithyia and Athene. Moreover the sacra carried are cereal cakes and nephalia: but the rites of the Haloa, though indeed mainly conducted by women, and sacred in part to Demeter, contain a new element, that of wine, and are therefore in mythological days regarded as ‘sacred to’ not only Demeter but Dionysos.

On this point an important scholion[372] to Lucian is explicit. The Haloa is ‘a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter and Kore and Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of the vines and the tasting of the wine made from them.’ Eustathius[373] states the same fact. ‘There is celebrated, according to Pausanias, a feast of Demeter and Dionysos called the Haloa.’ He adds, in explaining the name, that at it they were wont to carry first-fruits from Athens to Eleusis and to sport upon the threshing-floors, and that at the feast there was a procession of Poseidon. At Eleusis, Poseidon was not yet specialized into a sea-god only; he was Phytalmios, god of plants, and as such, it will be later seen (p. 427), his worship was easily affiliated to that of Dionysos.

The affiliation of the worship of the corn-goddess to that of the wine-god is of the first importance. The coming of Dionysos brought a new spiritual impulse to the religion of Greece, an impulse the nature of which will later be considered in full, and it was to this new impulse that the Eleusinian mysteries owed, apart from political considerations which do not concern us, their ultimate dominance. Of these mysteries the Haloa is, I think, the primitive prototype.

As to the primitive gist of the Haloa, there is no shadow of doubt: the name speaks for itself. Harpocration[374] rightly explains the festival, ‘the Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, from the fact that people hold sports at the threshing-floors, and he says it is celebrated in the month Poseideon.’ The sports held were of course incidental to the business of threshing, but it was these sports that constituted the actual festival. To this day the great round threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is the scene of the harvest festival. Near it a booth (σκηνή) is to this day erected, and in it the performers rest and eat and drink in the intervals of their pantomimic dancing.

The Haloa was celebrated in the month Poseideon (December-January), a fact as surprising as it is ultimately significant. What has a threshing festival to do with mid-winter, when all the grain should be safely housed in the barns? Normally, now as in ancient days, the threshing follows as soon as may be after the cutting of the corn; it is threshed and afterwards winnowed in the open threshing-floor, and mid-winter is no time even in Greece for an open-air operation.

The answer is simple. The shift of date is due to Dionysos. The rival festivals of Dionysos were in mid-winter. He possessed himself of the festivals of Demeter, took over her threshing-floor and compelled the anomaly of a winter threshing festival. The latest time that a real threshing festival could take place is Pyanepsion, but by Poseideon it is just possible to have an early Pithoigia and to revel with Dionysos. There could be no clearer witness to the might of the incoming god.

As to the nature of the Haloa we learn two important facts from Demosthenes. It was a festival in which the priestess, not the Hierophant, presented the offerings, a festival under the presidency of women; and these offerings were bloodless, no animal victim (ἱερεῖον) was allowed. Demosthenes[375] records how a Hierophant, Archias by name, ‘was cursed because at the Haloa he offered on the eschara in the court of Eleusis burnt sacrifice of an animal victim brought by the courtezan Sinope.’ His condemnation was on a double count, ‘it was not lawful on that day to sacrifice an animal victim, and the sacrifice was not his business but that of the priestess.’ The epheboi[376] offered bulls at Eleusis, and, it would appear, engaged in some sort of ‘bull fight[377],’ but this must have been in honour either of Dionysos or of Poseidon who preceded him: the vehicle of both these divinities was the bull. It was the boast of the archon at the Haloa that Demeter had given to men ‘gentle foods.’

Our fullest details of the Haloa, as of the Thesmophoria, come to us from the newly discovered scholia on Lucian[378]. From the scholiast’s account it is clear that by his day the festival was regarded as connected with Dionysos as much as, or possibly more than, with Demeter. He definitely states that it was instituted in memory of the death of Ikarios after his introduction of the vine into Attica. The women he says celebrated it alone, in order that they might have perfect freedom of speech. The sacred symbols of both sexes were handled, the priestesses secretly whispered into the ears of the women present words that might not be uttered aloud, and the women themselves uttered all manner of what seemed to him unseemly quips and jests. The sacra handled are, it is clear, the same as those of the Thesmophoria: that their use and exhibition were carefully guarded is also clear from the exclusion of the other sex. The climax of the festival, it appears, was a great banquet. ‘Much wine was set out and the tables were full of all the foods that are yielded by land and sea, save only those that are prohibited in the mysteries, I mean the pomegranate and the apple and domestic fowls, and eggs and red sea-mullet and black-tail and crayfish and shark. The archons prepare the tables and leave the women inside and themselves withdraw and remain outside, making a public statement to the visitors present that the “gentle foods” were discovered by them (i.e. the people of Eleusis) and by them shared with the rest of mankind. And there are upon the tables cakes shaped like the symbols of sex. And the name Haloa is given to the feast on account of the fruit of Dionysos—for the growths of the vine are called Aloai.’

The materials of the women’s feast are interesting. The diet prescribed is of cereals and of fish and possibly fowl, but clearly not of flesh. As such it is characteristic of the old Pelasgian population before the coming of the flesh-eating Achaeans. Moreover—a second point of interest—it is hedged in with all manner of primitive taboos. The precise reason of the taboo on pomegranates, red mullet and the like, is lost beyond recall, but some of the particular taboos are important because they are strictly paralleled in the Eleusinian mysteries. That the pomegranate was ‘taboo’ at the Eleusinian mysteries is clear from the aetiological myth in the Homeric hymn to Demeter[379]. Hades consents to let Persephone return to the upper air.

‘So spake he, and Persephone the prudent up did rise Glad in her heart and swift to go. But he in crafty wise Looked round and gave her stealthily a sweet pomegranate seed To eat, that not for all her days with Her of sable-weed, Demeter, should she tarry.’

The pomegranate was dead men’s food, and once tasted drew Persephone back to the shades. Demeter admits it; she says[380] to Persephone:

‘If thou hast tasted food below, thou canst not tarry here, Below the hollow earth must dwell the third part of the year.’

Porphyry[381] in his treatise on Abstinence from Animal Food, notes the reason and the rigour of the Eleusinian taboos. Demeter, he says, is a goddess of the lower world and they consecrate the cock to her. The word he uses, ἀφιέρωσαν, really means put under a taboo. We are apt to associate the cock with daylight and his early morning crowing, but the Greeks for some reason regarded the bird as chthonic. It is a cock, Socrates remembers, that he owes to Asklepios, and Asklepios, it will be seen when we come to the subject of hero-worship, was but a half-deified hero. The cock was laid under a taboo, reserved, and then came to be considered as a sacrifice. Porphyry goes on ‘It is because of this that the mystics abstain from barndoor fowls. And at Eleusis public proclamation is made that men must abstain from barndoor fowls, from fish and from beans, and from the pomegranate and from apples, and to touch these defiles as much as to touch a woman in child-birth or a dead body.’ The Eleusinian Mysteries were in their enactments the very counterpart of the Haloa.

THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES.

The Eleusinian Mysteries[382] are usually treated as if they were a thing by themselves, a ceremony so significant, so august, as to stand apart from the rest of Greek Ritual. If my view be correct, they are primarily but the Eleusinian Haloa: all their ultimate splendour and spiritual as well as social prestige are due to two things, first the fact that Athens for political purposes made them her own, second that at some date we cannot exactly fix, they became affiliated to the mysteries of Dionysos. To Athens the mysteries owe their external magnificence, to Dionysos and Orpheus their deep inward content. The external magnificence, being non-religious, does not concern us; the deep inward content, the hope of immortality and the like are matters of cardinal import, but must stand over till a later chapter, after the incoming of Dionysos has been discussed. For the present what concerns us is, setting aside all vague statements and opinions as to the meaning and spiritual influence attributed by various authors, ancient and modern, to the mysteries, to examine the actual ritual facts of which evidence remains.

Mysteries were by no means confined to the religion of Demeter and Kore. There were mysteries of Hermes, of Iasion, of Ino, of Archemoros, of Agraulos, of Hecate. In general mysteries seem to occur more usually in relation to the cult of women divinities[383], of heroines and earth-goddesses; from the worship of the Olympians in Homer they are markedly absent. In general, by a mystery is meant a rite in which certain sacra are exhibited, which cannot be safely seen by the worshipper till he has undergone certain purifications.

The date of the mysteries at Eleusis is fortunately certain. The ceremonies began on the 13th of Boedromion, i.e. about the end of September, an appropriate date for any harvest festival which was to include the later fruits and notably the grape. Our evidence for this date is an imperial Roman inscription[384], but this inscription expressly states that its enactments are ‘according to ancient usage.’ ‘The people has decided to order the Kosmeter of the Epheboi in accordance with ancient usage to send them to Eleusis on the 13th day of Boedromion, in their customary dress, for the procession that accompanies the sacra, in order that on the 14th they may escort them to the Eleusinion which is at the foot of the Acropolis. Also to order the Kosmeter of the Epheboi to conduct them on the 19th to Eleusis in the same dress, escorting the sacra.’ The inscription is of great importance, as it is clear evidence that sacra were part of the regular ritual. What precisely these sacra were we do not know; presumably they were objects like those in use at the Thesmophoria. The going to and fro from Eleusis to Athens is purely political. The sacra were really resident at Eleusis, but Athens liked to think she brought them there. The Epheboi escorted the sacra, but, as was fitting, they were really in charge of, and actually carried by, priestesses[385].

On the 15th of Boedromion took place the ἀγυρμός or assembling of the candidates for initiation, and the proclamation by the Hierophant in the Stoa Poikile interdicting those whose hands were defiled and those whose lips spoke unintelligible words[386]. Some such interdiction, some ‘fencing of the tables,’ took place in all probability before all mysteries. It is this prorrhesis of course that is parodied by Aristophanes in the Frogs[387], who actually dares to put his burlesque into the mouth of the Hierophant himself.

The 16th of Boedromion saw the accomplishment of a rite of cardinal importance. The day was called in popular parlance ‘ἅλαδε μύσται,’ ‘To the sea ye mystics,’ from the cry that heralded the act of purification. Hesychius[388] in commenting on the expression says ‘a certain day of the Mysteries at Athens.’ Polyaenus[389] is precise as to the date. He says ‘Chabrias won the sea-fight at Naxos on the 16th of Boedromion. He had felt that this was a good day for a battle, because it was one of the days of the Great Mysteries. The same thing happened with Themistocles against the Persians at Salamis. But Themistocles and his troops had the “Iacchos” for their call, while Chabrias and his troops had “To the sea ye mystics.”’ The victory of Chabrias was won, as we know from Plutarch[390], at the full moon, and at the full moon the Mysteries were celebrated.

The procession to the sea was called by the somewhat singular name ἔλασις, ‘driving’ or ‘banishing[391],’ and the word is instructive. The procession was not a mere procession, it was a driving out, a banishing. This primary sense seems to lurk in the Greek word πομπή[392], which in primitive days seems to have mainly meant a conducting out, a sending away of evil. The bathing in the sea was a purification, a conducting out, a banishing of evil, and each man took with him his own pharmakos, a young pig. The ἔλασις, the driving, may have been literally the driving of the pig, which, as the goal was some 6 miles distant, must have been a lengthy and troublesome business. Arrived at the sea, each man bathed with his pig—the pig of purification was itself purified. When in the days of Phocion[393] the Athenians were compelled to receive a Macedonian garrison, terrible portents appeared. When the ribbons with which the mystic beds were wound came to be dyed, instead of taking a purple colour they came out of a sallow death-like hue, which was the more remarkable as when it was the ribbons belonging to private persons that were dyed, they came out all right. And more portentous still—‘when a mystic was bathing his pig in the harbour called Kantharos, a sea-monster ate off the lower part of his body, by which the god made clear beforehand that they would be deprived of the lower parts of the city that lay near the sea, but keep the upper portion.’

The pig of purification was a ritual element, so important that when Eleusis was permitted (B.C. 350-327) to issue her autonomous coinage[394] it is the pig that she chooses as the sign and symbol of her mysteries. The bronze coin in fig. 14 shows the pig standing on the torch: in the exergue an ivy spray. The pig was the cheapest and commonest of sacrificial animals, one that each and every citizen could afford. Socrates in the Republic[395] says ‘if people are to hear shameful and monstrous stories about the gods it should be only rarely and to a select few in a mystery, and they should have to sacrifice not a (mere) pig but some huge and unprocurable victim.’

Purification, it is clear, was an essential feature of the mysteries, and this brings us to the consideration of the meaning of the word mystery. The usual derivation of the word is from μύω, I close the apertures whether of eyes or mouth. The mystes, it is supposed, is the person vowed to secrecy who has not seen and will not speak of the things revealed. As such he is distinguished from the epoptes who has seen, but equally may not speak; the two words indicate successive grades of initiation. It will later be seen (p. 480) that in the Orphic Mysteries the word mystes is applied, without any reference to seeing or not seeing, to a person who has fulfilled the rite of eating the raw flesh of a bull. It will also be seen that in Crete, which is probably the home of the mysteries, the mysteries were open to all, they were not mysterious. The derivation of mystery from μύω, though possible, is not satisfactory. I would suggest another and a simple origin.

The ancients themselves were not quite comfortable about the connection with μύω. They knew and felt that mystery, secrecy, was not the main gist of ‘a mystery’: the essence of it all primarily was purification in order that you might safely eat and handle certain sacra. There was no revelation, no secret to be kept, only a mysterious taboo to be prepared for and finally overcome. It might be a taboo on eating first-fruits, it might be a taboo on handling magical sacra. In the Thesmophoria, the women fast before they touch the sacra; in the Eleusinian mysteries you sacrifice a pig before you offer and partake of the first-fruits. The gist of it all is purification. Clement[396] says significantly, ‘Not unreasonably among the Greeks in their mysteries do ceremonies of purification hold the initial place, as with barbarians the bath.’ Merely as an insulting conjecture Clement[397] in his irresponsible abusive fashion throws out what I believe to be the real origin of the word mystery. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘that these orgies and mysteries of yours ought to be derived, the one from the wrath (ὀργή) of Demeter against Zeus, the other from the pollution (μύσος) relating to Dionysos.’ Of course Clement is formally quite incorrect, but he hits on what seems a possible origin of the word mystery, that it is the doing of what relates to a μύσος, a pollution, it is primarily a ceremony of purification. Lydus[398] makes the same suggestion, ‘Mysteries,’ he says, ‘are from the separating away of a pollution (μύσος) as equivalent to sanctification.’

The bathing with the pig was not the only rite of purification in the mysteries, though it is the one of which we have most definite detail. From the aetiology[399] of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we may conjecture that there were, at least for children, rites of purification by passing through fire, and ceremonies of a mock fight or stone-throwing (λιθοβολία, βαλλητύς). All have the same intent and need not here be examined in detail.

On the night of the 19-20th[400] the procession of purified mystics, carrying with them the image of Iacchos, left Athens for Eleusis, and after that we have no evidence of the exact order of the various rites of initiation. The exact order is indeed of little importance. Instead we have recorded what is of immeasurably more importance, the precise formularies in which the mystics avowed the rites in which they had taken part, rites which we are bound to suppose constituted the primitive ceremony of initiation.

Before these are examined it is necessary to state definitely what already has been implied, i.e. the fact that at the mysteries there was an offering of first-fruits; the mysteries were in fact the Thargelia of Eleusis. An inscription[401] of the 5th century B.C. found at Eleusis is our best evidence. ‘Let the Hierophant and the Torch-bearer command that at the mysteries the Hellenes should offer first-fruits of their crops in accordance with ancestral usage.... To those who do these things there shall be many good things, both good and abundant crops, whoever of them do not injure the Athenians, nor the city of Athens, nor the two goddesses.’ The order of precedence is amusing and characteristic. Here we have indeed a commandment with promise.

The ‘token’ or formulary by which the mystic made confession is preserved for us by Clement[402] as follows: ‘I fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took from the chest, (having tasted?) I put back into the basket and from the basket into the chest.’ The statement involves, in the main, two acts besides the preliminary fast, i.e. the drinking of the kykeon and the handling of certain unnamed sacra.

It is significant of the whole attitude of Greek religion that the confession is not a confession of dogma or even faith, but an avowal of ritual acts performed. This is the measure of the gulf between ancient and modern. The Greeks in their greater wisdom saw that uniformity in ritual was desirable and possible; they left a man practically free in the only sphere where freedom is of real importance, i.e. in the matter of thought. So long as you fasted, drank the kykeon, handled the sacra, no one asked what were your opinions or your sentiments in the performance of those acts; you were left to find in every sacrament the only thing you could find—what you brought. Our own creed is mainly a Credo, an utterance of dogma, formulated by the few for the many, but it has traces of the more ancient conception of Confiteor, the avowal of ritual acts performed. Credo in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam is immediately followed by Confiteor unum baptismum, though the instinct of dogma surges up again in the final words in remissionem peccatorum.

The preliminary fast before the eating of sacred things is common to most primitive peoples; it is the simplest negative form of purification: among the more logical savages it is often accompanied by the taking of a powerful emetic. The kykeon requires a word of explanation. The first-fruits at Eleusis were presented in the form of a pelanos[403]. The nature of a pelanos has already been discussed, and the fact noted that the word pelanos was used only of the half-fluid mixture offered to the gods. Its equivalent for mortals was called alphita or sometimes kykeon. Eustathius in commenting on the drink prepared by Hekamede for Nestor, a drink made of barley and cheese and pale honey and onion and Pramnian wine, says that the word kykeon meant something between meat and drink, but inclining to be like a sort of soup that you could sup. Such a drink it was that in the Homeric Hymn Metaneira prepared for Demeter, only with no wine, for Demeter, as an underworld goddess ‘might not drink red wine’: and such a wineless drink, made in all probability from the pelanos and only differing from it in name, was set before the mystae.

Some ceremony like the drinking of the kykeon is represented in the vase-painting[404] in fig. 15. Two worshippers, a man and a woman, are seated side by side; before them a table piled with food, beneath it a basket of loaves. They are inscribed Mystae (Μυστα). A priest holding in the left hand twigs and standing by a little shrine, offers to them a cylix containing some form of drink. The presence of the little shrine has made some commentators see in the priest an itinerant quack priest (ἀγύρτης), but it is quite possible that shrines of this kind containing sacra were carried at the Eleusinian mysteries. Anyhow the scene depicted is analogous.

Of the actual sacra which the initiated had to take from the chest, place in the basket, and replace in the chest, we know nothing. The sacra of the Thesmophoria are known, those of the Dionysiac mysteries were of trivial character, a ball, a mirror, a cone, and the like: there is no reason to suppose that the sacra of the Eleusinian mysteries were of any greater intrinsic significance.

Clement[405] in a passage preceding that already quoted gives the Eleusinian ‘tokens,’ with slightly different wording and with two additional clauses: he says ‘the symbols of this initiation are, I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos, I passed beneath the pastos.’ The scholiast[406] on Plato’s Gorgias makes a similar statement. He says ‘at the lesser mysteries many disgraceful things were done, and these words were said by those who were being initiated: I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos’; he further adds by way of explanation ‘the kernos is the liknon or ptuon,’ i.e. it is some form of winnowing fan.

There has been much and, I think, needless controversy as to whether this form of the tokens belongs to the mysteries at Eleusis or not. From the words that precede Clement’s statement, a mention of Attis, Kybele and the Korybants, it is quite clear that he has in his mind the mysteries of the Great Mother of Asia Minor, but from his mentioning Demeter also, it is also clear that he does not exactly distinguish between the two. The mention of the ‘tokens’ by the scholiast on Plato is expressly made with reference to the Lesser Mysteries, and these, it will later (Chap. X) be seen, are related especially to Kore and Dionysos. The whole confusion rests on the simple mythological fact that Demeter and Cybele were but local forms of the Great Mother worshipped under diverse names all over Greece. Wherever she was worshipped she had mysteries, the timbrel and the cymbal came to be characteristic of the wilder Asiatic Mother, but the Mother at Eleusis also clashed the brazen cymbals. In her ‘tokens’ however her mystics ate from the cista and the basket, but the distinction is a slight one.

The question of the kernos is of some interest. The scholiast states that the kernos was a winnowing fan, and the winnowing fan we shall later see (p. 548) was, at least in Alexandrine days, used in the mysteries of Eleusis. It was a simple agricultural instrument taken over and mysticized by the religion of Dionysos. From Athenaeus[407] however we learn of another kind of kernos. In his discussion of the various kinds of cups and their uses he says: ‘Kernos, a vessel made of earthenware, having in it many little cups fastened to it, in which are white poppies, wheat, barley, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils; and he who carries it after the fashion of the carrier of the liknon, tastes of these things, as Ammonius relates in his third book On Altars and Sacrifices.’ A second and rather fuller notice of the kernos is given by Athenaeus[408] a little later in discussing the kotylos. ‘Polemon in his treatise “On the Dian Fleece” says, “And after this he performs the rite and takes it from the chamber and distributes it to those who have borne the kernos aloft.”’ Then follows an amplified list of the contents of the kernos. The additions are italicized: ‘sage, white poppies, wheat, barley, pulse, vetch, ochroi, lentils, beans, spelt, oats, a cake, honey, oil, wine, milk, sheep’s wool unwashed.’

The list of the παγκαρπία, the offering of all fruits and natural products, is in some respects a primitive one: the unwashed wool reminds us of the simple offering made by Pausanias at the cave of Demeter at Phigalia; but there are late additions, the manufactured olive oil and wine. Demeter in early days would assuredly never have accepted wine. The kernos, like the offerings it contained, is comparatively late and complex. Vessels exactly corresponding to the description given by Athenaeus have been found in considerable numbers in the precinct at Eleusis, both vessels meant for use and others obviously votive. In the accounts[409] of the officials at Eleusis for the year 408-7 B.C. there is mention of a vessel called κέρχνος, which in all probability is identical with the kernos of Athenaeus. The shape and purport of the vessel are clearly seen in the very perfect specimen[410] in fig. 16. Such a vessel might well be called a separator; each of the little kotyliskoi attached would contain a sample of the various grains and products. It is easy to see how the scholiast might explain it as a liknon. The liknon was an implement for winnowing, separating grain from chaff, the kernos a vessel in which various sorts of grain could be kept separate. The Kernophoria was nothing but a late and elaborate form of the offering of first-fruits. In the simple primaeval form of the Mysteries as certified by the tokens, we have but two elements, the presentation and tasting of first-fruits and the handling of sacra. All later accretions will be discussed in the chapter on Orphic Mysteries.

In discussing the Anthesteria (p. 42) mention has already been made of a rite which, according to Athenaeus[411], took place on the final day of the Mysteries. On this day, which took its name from the rite, two vessels called plemochoae are emptied, one towards the east, the other towards the west, and at the moment of outpouring a mystic formulary was pronounced. Athenaeus explains that a plemochoè was an earthenware vessel ‘shaped like a top but standing secure on its basis’: it seems to have been a vessel in general use for the service of the underworld, for he quotes a play called Peirithous in which one of the characters said:

‘That these plemochoai with well-omened words We may pour down into the chthonian chasm.’

What the mystic formulary was we cannot certainly say, but it is tempting to connect the libation of the plemochoè with a formulary recorded by Proclus[412]. He says ‘In the Eleusinian mysteries, looking up to the sky they cried aloud “Rain,” and looking down to earth they cried “Be fruitful.”’ The simplicity of the solemn little prayer cannot be reproduced in English. It was a fitting close to rites so primitive.

Last of all, over those who had been initiated were uttered, if we may trust Hesychius[413], the mysterious words Κὸγξ ὄμπαξ.

* * * * *

It remains to resume the results of the last four chapters. It has been seen in examining four of the great public festivals of Athens, the Diasia, the Anthesteria, the Thargelia, the Thesmophoria, that neither their names, nor primarily their ritual, were concerned with the worship of the Olympian gods to whom the festivals were ostensibly dedicated. When the nature of that ritual was examined, it was seen to consist not in sacrifice like that paid to the Olympians, which was of the nature of tendance and might be embodied in the formula do ut des, but rather of ceremonies of aversion based on ignorance and fear. Its formula was do ut abeas. In the Anthesteria the ceremonies known as ἐναγισμοί were seen to be purifications (καθαρμοί), and by purifications were meant placations of Keres, of ghosts and sprites. In the Thargelia the ceremony of the pharmakos was seen to be also a purification, but in the sense not of the placation or riddance of ghosts and sprites but of a magical cleansing from physical evil. In the Thesmophoria the ceremony with the pigs was preceded by ceremonies of purification, and was in itself of magical intent. Moreover the element of cursing and devotion was seen to lie at the root of the later notion of consecration. To these three festivals, taken from the three seasons of the agricultural year, has now been added the rite of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the gist of which has been shown to be purification as preliminary to the handling of magical sacra and to the partaking of first-fruits.

The only just way of understanding the religious notions of a particular race is to examine the terminology of the language of that race. Our modern notion of ancient religion is largely summed up by the word ‘sacrifice.’ We are too apt to ask ‘what was the nature of sacrifice among the Greeks?’ If we follow the lead of their language instead of imposing our language on them, it is abundantly clear that sacrifice, with all our modern connotations of vicarious expiation and of mystical communion, they had not. All the ancient ceremonies, so far considered, point to a thought simpler and nowise less beautiful or less deeply religious, and that thought is purification. Purification practically unknown to Olympian worship is the keynote of the lower stratum.

It is all important that this should be clearly and emphatically stated at this point in order that the sequel may be intelligible. When the new impulse connected with the names of Dionysos and Orpheus entered Greece, it left aside the great and popular Olympian system embodied in the formula do ut des, and, by a true instinct, fastened on an element which, if in some respects it was lower, was truer to fact and had in it higher possibilities, a religion that recognized evil, though mainly in physical form, and that sought for purification.

The essence of that new religion was, as will later be shown, the belief that man could become god: the new ritual feature it introduced, a feature wholly lacking in the old uneaten ‘sacrifices,’ was mystical communion by the eating of the body of the god. But, because man was mortal, there was mortality to be purged away; and hence, although with a new faith and hope, men reverted to the old ritual of purification.

So much by anticipation; but before we come to the study of the new impulse it is necessary to leave ritual and turn to theology, which is in fact mythology: the rites have been considered, and now in the next three chapters something must be said of the beings worshipped,—at first in vague shifting outlines as ghosts and sprites,—later crystallized into clear shapes as goddesses and gods.