able by the exercise of his reason to define the idea of the good,
separating it from all other objects and piercing as in a battle through
every kind of argument; endeavouring to confute, not according to
opinion but according to evidence, and proceeding with all these
dialectical exercises with an unshaken reason--he who cannot accomplish
this, would you not say that he neither knows the good itself, nor
anything which is properly demonstrated good? And would you not assert
that such a one when he apprehended it rather through the medium of
opinion than of science, that in the present life he is sunk in sleep
and conversant with delusions and dreams; and that before he is roused
to a vigilant state he will descend to Hades, and be overwhelmed with
sleep perfectly profound?"
Olympiodorus, in his MS. Commentary on the Georgias of Plato, says of
the Elysian fields: "It is necessary to know that the fortunate islands
are said to be raised above the sea.... Hercules is reported to have
accomplished his last labour in the Hesperian regions, signifying by
this that, having vanquished an obscure and terrestrial life, he
afterwards lived in open day--that is, in truth and resplendent light.
So that he who in the present state vanquishes as much as possible a
corporeal life, through the exercise of the cathartic virtues, passes in
reality into the fortunate islands of the soul, and lives surrounded
with the bright splendours of truth and wisdom proceeding from the sun
of good."
The esoteric teaching was not, of course, grasped by all the initiates;
the majority merely recognized or grasped the exoteric doctrine of a
future state of rewards and punishments. Virgil, in his description, in
the _Æneid_, of the Mysteries, confines himself to the exoteric
teaching. Æneas, having passed over the Stygian lake, meets with the
three-headed Cerberus. By Cerberus must be understood the discriminative
part of the soul, of which a dog, by reason of its sagacity, is an
emblem. The three heads signify the intellective, dianoetic, and doxatic
powers. "He dragg'd the three-mouth'd dog to upper day"--i.e. by
temperance, continence, and other virtues he drew upwards the various
powers of the soul. The teaching of the Mysteries was not in opposition
to the ordinary creed: it deepened it rather, revived it in a spiritual
manner and gave to religion a force and a power it had not hitherto
possessed.
The fable of Persephone, as belonging to the Mysteries, was properly of
a mixed nature, composed of all four species of fable--theological,
physical, animistic, and material. According to the arcana of ancient
theology, the Coric order--i.e. that belonging to Persephone--is
twofold, one part supermundane and the other mundane.
Proclus says: "According to the rumour of theologists, who delivered to
us the most holy Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone abides on high, in
those dwellings of her mother which she prepared for her in inaccessible
places, exempt from the sensible world. But she likewise dwells with
Pluto, administering terrestrial concerns, governing the recesses of the
earth and imparting soul to beings which are of themselves inanimate and
dead."
The Orphic poet describes Persephone as "the life and the death of
mortals," and as being the mother of Eubuleus or Bacchus by an ineffable
intercourse with Jupiter. Porphyry asserts that the wood pigeon was
sacred to her and that she was the same as Maia, or the great mother,
who is usually claimed as the parent of the Arkite god Mercury.
According to Nösselt the following may be taken as the meaning of the
myth of Demeter and her lost daughter: "Persephone, the daughter of the
all-productive earth (Demeter), is the seed. The earth rejoices at the
sight of the plants and flowers, but they fade and wither, and the seed
disappears quickly from the face of the earth when it is strewn on the
ground. The dreaded monarch of the underworld has taken possession of
it. In vain the mother searches for her child, the whole face of nature
mourns her loss, and everything sorrows and grieves with her. But,
secretly and unseen, the seed develops itself in the lap of the earth,
and at length it starts forth: what was dead is now alive; the earth,
all decked with fresh green, rejoices at the recovery of her long-lost
daughter, and everything shares in the joy."
Demeter was worshipped in a twofold sense by the Greeks, as the
foundress of agriculture and as goddess of law and order. They used to
celebrate yearly in her honour the Thesmorphoria, or Festival of Laws.
According to some ancient writers the Greeks, prior to the time of
Demeter and Triptolemus, fed upon the acorns of the ilex, or the
evergreen oak. Acorns, according to Virgil, were the food in Epiros, and
in Spain, according to Strabo. The Scythians made bread with acorns.
According to another tradition, before Demeter's time, men neither
cultivated corn nor tilled the ground, but roamed the mountains and
woods in search for the wild fruits which the earth produced. Isocrates
wrote: "Ceres hath made the Athenians two presents of the greatest
consequence: corn, which brought us out of a state of brutality; and the
Mysteries, which teach the initiated to entertain the most agreeable
expectations touching death and eternity." The coins of Eleusis
represented Demeter in a car drawn by dragons or serpents which were
sometimes winged. The goddess had two ears of corn in her right hand or,
as some imagined, torches, indicating that she was searching for her
daughter. George Wheler, in his _Journey into Greece_, published in
1682, says: "We observed many large stones covered with wheat-ears and
bundles of poppy bound together; these being the characters of Ceres."
At Copenhagen there is a statue representing Demeter holding poppies and
ears of corn in her left hand. On a coin of Lampsacus of the fourth
century B.C., Persephone is described in the act of rising from the
earth.
According to Taylor, the Platonist, Demeter in the legend represents the
evolution of that self-inspective part of our nature which we properly
determine intellect, and Persephone that vital, self-moving, and animate
part which we call soul. Pluto signifies the whole of our material
nature, and, according to Pythagoras, the empire of this god commences
downwards from the Galaxy or Milky Way.
Sallust says that among the mundane divinities Ceres is the deity of the
planet Saturn. The cavern signifies the entrance into mundane life
accomplished by the union of the soul with the terrestrial body.
Demeter, who was afraid lest some violence be offered to Persephone on
account of her inimitable beauty, conveyed her privately to Sicily and
concealed her in a house built on purpose by the Cyclops, while she
herself directed her course to the temple of Cybele, the mother of the
gods. Here we see the first cause of the soul's descent, viz. her
desertion of a life wholly according to intellect, occultly signified by
the separation of Demeter and Persephone. Afterwards Jupiter instructed
Venus to go and betray Persephone from her retirement, that Pluto might
be enabled to carry her away, and, to prevent any suspicion in the
virgin's mind, he commanded Diana and Pallas to bear her company. The
three goddesses on arrival found Persephone at work on a scarf for her
mother, on which she had embroidered the primitive chaos and the
formation of the world. Venus, says Taylor, is significant of desire,
which, even in the celestial regions (for such is the residence of
Persephone until she is ravished by Pluto), begins silently and
fraudulently in the recesses of the soul. Minerva is symbolical of the
rational power of the soul; and Diana represents nature, or the merely
natural and vegetable part of our composition, both ensnared through the
allurements of desire.
In Ovid we have Narcissus, the metamorphosis of a youth who fell a
victim to love of his own corporeal form. The rape of Persephone,
according to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, was the immediate consequence
of her gathering this wonderful flower. By Narcissus falling in love
with his shadow in the limpid stream we behold the representation of a
beautiful soul, which, by prolonged gaze upon the material form, becomes
enamoured of a corporeal life and changed into a being consisting wholly
of the mere energies of nature. Plato, forcing his passage through the
earth, seizes on Persephone and carries her away, despite the resistance
of Minerva and Diana, who were forbidden by Jupiter to attempt her
deliverance after her abduction. This signifies that the lapse of the
soul into a material nature is contrary to the genuine wish and proper
condition. Pluto having hurried Persephone into the infernal regions,
marriage succeeds. That is to say, the soul having sunk into the
profoundities of a material nature, unites with the dark tenement of the
material body. Night is with great beauty and propriety introduced,
standing by the nuptial couch and confirming the oblivious league. That
is to say, the soul, by union with a material body, becomes familiar
with darkness and subject to the empire of night, in consequence of
which she dwells wholly with delusive phantoms and till she breaks her
fetters is deprived of the perception of that which is real and true.
The nine days of the Festival are said to be significant of the descent
of the soul. The soul, in falling from her original, divine abode in the
heavens, passes through eight spheres, viz. the inerratic sphere and the
seven planets, assuming a different body and employing different
energies in each, finally becoming connected with the sublunary world
and a terrene body on the ninth. Demeter and the foundation of the art
of tillage are said to signify the descent of intellect into the realms
of generation, the greatest benefit and ornament which a material nature
is capable of receiving. Without the possibility of the participation of
intellect in the lower material sphere nothing but an irrational and a
brutal life would subsist.
But, according to some writers, the initiates into the third degree were
taught that the gods and goddesses were only dead mortals, subject while
alive to the same passions and infirmities as themselves; and they were
taught to look upon the Supreme Cause, the Creator of the Universe, as
pervading all things by His virtue and governing all things by His
power. Thus the meaning of _Mystes_ is given as "one who sees things in
disguise," and that of _Epopt_ as "one who sees things as they are,
without disguise." The Epopt, after passing through the ceremonial of
exaltation, was said to have received Autopsia, or complete vision.
Virgil declared that the secret of the Mysteries was the Unity of the
Godhead, and Plato owned it to be "difficult to find the Creator of the
Universe, and, when found, impossible to discover Him to all the world."
Varro, in his work _Of Religions_, says that "there were many truths
which it was inconvenient for the State to be generally known; and many
things which, though false, it was expedient the people should believe,
and that, therefore, the Greeks shut up their Mysteries in the silence
of their sacred enclosures." The Mysteries declared that the future life
was not the shadowy, weary existence which it had hitherto been supposed
to be, but that through the rites of purification and sacrifices of a
sacramental character man could secure a better hope for the future.
Thus the Eleusinian Mysteries became the chief agent in the conversion
of the Greek world from the Homeric view of Hades to a more hopeful
belief as to man's state after death. Tully promulgated a law forbidding
nocturnal sacrifices in which women were permitted to take part, but
made an express exception in favour of the Eleusinian Mysteries, giving
as his reason: "Athens hath produced many excellent, even divine
inventions and applied them to the use of life, but she has given
nothing better than those Mysteries by which we are drawn from an
irrational and savage life and tamed, as it were, and broken to
humanity. They are truly called _Initia_, for they are indeed the
beginnings of a life of reason and virtue."
Secrecy was enjoined because it was regarded as essential that the
profane should not be permitted to share the knowledge of the true
nature of Demeter and Persephone, as if it were known that these
goddesses were only mortal women their worship would become
contemptible. Cicero says that it was the humanity of Demeter and
Persephone, their places of interment, and several facts of a like
nature that were concealed with so much care. Diagoras, the Melian, was
accounted an atheist because he revealed the real secret of the
Eleusinian. Mysteries. The charge of atheism was the lot of any who
communicated a knowledge of the one, only God. Pindar says, referring to
the Mysteries: "Happy is he who has seen these things before leaving
this world: he realizes the beginning and the end of life, as ordained
by Zeus"; and Sophocles wrote: "Oh, thrice blessed the mortals, who,
having contemplated these Mysteries, have descended to Hades; for those
only will there be a future life of happiness--the others there will
find nothing but suffering."
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