Lewis Richard Farnell

“ The Greek consciousness of the sin of murder, only dimly awakened in the Homeric period, and only sensitive at first when a kinsman or a suppliant was slain, gradually expands till the sanctity of all human life becomes recognized by the higher morality of the people: and the names of Ζεὺς Μειλίχιος, the dread deity of the ghost-world whom the sinner must make “placable,” of Ἱκέσιος and Προστροπαῖος, to whom the conscience-striken outcast may turn for mercy and pardon, play a guiding-part in this momentous evolution. ”

“ As regards the Eleusinia, we are in a better position for the investigation of them than our predecessors were; for the modern methods of comparative religion and anthropology have at least taught us to ask the right questions and to apply relevant hypotheses; archaeology, the study of vases, excavations on the site, yielding an ever-increasing hoard of inscriptions, have taught us much concerning the external organization of the mysteries, and have shown us the beautiful figures of the deities as they appeared to the eye or to the mental vision of the initiated. ”

“ On the whole, we discern that the moral influence of Delphi was beneficent and on the side of righteousness. It did nothing, indeed, to abolish, it may even have encouraged at times, the barbarous practice of human sacrifice, which was becoming abhorrent to the Greek of the 6th and 5th centuries; but a conservative priesthood is always liable to lag behind the moral progress of an age in respect of certain rites, and in other respects it appears that the “Holy Ones” of Delphi kept well abreast of the Hellenic advance in ethical thought. ”

“ And in one most important branch of morality, with which progressive ancient law was intimately concerned, namely, the concept of the sin of homicide, we have reason for believing that the Apoline oracle played a leading part. Perhaps so early as the 8th century, it came to lay stress on the impurity of bloodshed and to organize and impose a ritual of purification; and thus to assist the development and the clearer definition of the concept of murder as a sin and the growth of a theory of equity which recognizes extenuating or justifying circumstances. ”

“ Greek Mysteries.—It is important to obtain a clear conception of the exact significance of the Greek term μυστήριον, which is often associated and at times appears synonymous with the words τελετή, ὄργια. We may interpret “mystery” in its original Greek meaning as a “secret” worship, to which only certain specially prepared people—οί μυηθέντες—were admitted after a special period of purification or other preliminary probation, and of which the ritual was so important and perilous that the “catechumen” needed a hierophant or expounder to guide him aright. ”

“ At any rate, if a holy marriage formed part of the passion-play, it may well have been acted with solemnity and delicacy. We have no reason to believe that even to a modern taste any part of the ritual would appear coarse or obscene; even Clement, who brings a vague charge of obscenity against all mysteries in general, does not try to substantiate it in regard to the Eleusinia, and we hear from another Christian writer of the scrupulous purity of the hierophant.
It would be interesting to know if the birth of a holy child, a babe Iacchus, for example, was a motive of the mystic drama. ”

“ The assurance of the hope of the Eleusinian votary was obtained by the feeling of friendship and mystic sympathy, established by mystic contact, with the mother and the daughter, the powers of life after death. Those who won their friendship by initiation in this life would by the simple logic of faith regard themselves as certain to win blessing at their hands in the next.
It is obvious that the mysteries made no direct appeal to the intellect, nor on the other hand revolted it by any oppressive dogmatism. ”

“ But probably in his earliest Hellenic period the power of Zeus in the natural world was not limited to the sky. A deity who sent the fertilizing rains would come to be regarded as a god of vegetation, who descended into the earth, and whose power worked in the life that wells forth from the earth in plant and tree. ”

“ The Phrygian-Sabazian mysteries, associated with Attis, Cybele and Sabazius, which invaded later Greece and early imperial Rome, were originally akin to these and contained many concepts in common with them. But their orgiastic ecstasy was more violent, and the psychical aberrations to which the votaries were prone through their passionate desire for divine communion were more dangerous. Emasculation was practised by the devotees, probably in order to assimilate themselves as far as possible to their goddess by abolishing the distinction of sex, and the high-priest himself bore the god’s name. ”

“ The deities who are worshipped with mystic rites have in most cases Hellenic names and do not all belong to the earliest stratum of Hellenic religion. Besides those of Demeter, by far the most numerous in the Hellenic world, we have record of the mysteries of Ge at Phlye in Attica, of Aglauros and the Charities at Athens, of Hecate at Aegina; a shrine of Artemis Μρυσία on the road between Sparta and Arcadia points to a mystic cult of this goddess, and we can infer the existence of a similar worship of Themis. ”

“ We are sure, then, that in the high tide of the Attic religious history Iacchus was the youthful Dionysus, a name of the great god peculiar to Attic cult; and this is all that here concerns us to know.
We can now answer the question raised above. This youthful Attic Dionysus has his home at Athens; he accompanies his votaries along the sacred way, filling their souls with the exaltation and ecstasy of the Dionysiac spirit; but at Eleusis he had no temple, altar or abiding home; he comes as a visitor and departs. ”

“ How, we may ask, were the votaries assured? M. Foucart in Les grands mystéres d’Eleusis has maintained that the object of the mysteries was much the same as that of the Egyptian Book of the Dead; to provide the mystae with elaborate rules for avoiding the dangers that beset the road to the other world, and for attaining at last to the happy regions; that for this purpose the hierophant recited magic formulae whereby the soul could repel the demons that it might encounter on the path; and that it was to seek this deliverance from the terrors of hell that all Greece flocked to Eleusis. ”

“ Thunder magic, which was practised in Arcadia, is usually associated with thunder divination; but of this, which was so much in vogue in Etruria and was adopted as a state-craft by Rome, the evidence in Greece is singularly slight. Once a year watchers took their stand on the wall at Athens and waited till they saw the lightning flash from Harma, which was accepted as an auspicious omen for the setting out of the sacred procession to Apollo Pythius at Delphi; and the altar of Zeus Σημαλέος, the sender of omens, on Mount Parnes, may have been a religious observatory of meteorological phenomena. ”

“ The other branch of the mantic art, the ecstatic or inspired, has had the greater career among the peoples of the higher religions; and morphologically we may call it the more advanced, as Shamanism or demoniac or divine possession implies the belief in spirits or divinities. But actually it is no doubt of great antiquity, and it is found still existing at a rather low grade of savagery. Therefore it is unsafe to infer from Homer's silence about it that it only became prevalent in Greece in the post-Homeric period. It did not altogether supersede the simpler method of divination by omens ”

“ The Arcadian city of Pheneus possessed a mystery that boasted an Eleusinian character and origin, yet in the record of it there is no mention of Kore, and we may suspect that, like other Demeter-worships in the Peloponnese, it belonged to a period when the earth-goddess was revered as a single personality and Kore had not yet emanated from her. We know much more of the details of the great Andanian mysteries in Messenia, owing to the discovery of the important and much-discussed Andanian inscription of 91 B.C. [15] But what we know are facts of secondary importance only. ”

“ The “Holy Marriage” was celebrated in many parts of Greece, and certain details of the ritual suggest that it was of great antiquity; here and there it may have had the significance of vegetation-magic, [26] like the marriage of the Lord and Lady of May; but generally it seems to have been only regarded as a divine counterpart to the human ceremony. Society may have at one time been matrilinear in the communities that become the historic Hellenes; but of this there is no trace in the worship of Zeus and Hera. ”

“ A glimpse into a very old stratum of Hellenic religion is afforded us by the records of Dodona. A Dodonean liturgy has been preserved which, though framed in the form of an invocation and a dogma, has the force of a spell-prayer—“Zeus was and is and will be, oh great Zeus: earth gives forth fruits, therefore call on Mother Earth.” [18] Zeus the Sky-God is seen here allied to the Earth-Goddess, of whom his feminine counterpart, Dione, may have been the personal form. ”

“ Whatever symbolism attached to the ἱερά, the sacred objects shown, was probably simple and natural; for instance, in the Eleusinian, as in Egyptian eschatology, the token of the growing corn may have served as an emblem—though not a proof—of man's resurrection. The doctrine of the continuance of the soul after death was already accepted by the popular belief, and the hierophant had no need to preach it as a dogma; the votaries came to Eleusis to ensure themselves a happy immortality. And in our earliest record, the Homeric hymn. we find that the mysteries already hold out this higher promise. ”

“ As conservative aristocrats they would probably dislike tyranny; their action against the Peisistratidae was interested, but one oracle contains a spirited rebuke to Cleisthenes, while one or two others, perhaps not genuine, express the spirit of temperate constitutionalism. As exponents of an Amphictyonic system they would be sufficiently sensitive of the moral conscience of Greece to utter nothing in flagrant violation of the “jus gentium.” In one department of politics, the legislative sphere, it has been supposed that the influence of Delphi was direct and inspiring. ”

“ The most interesting example is the epitaph of a hierophant who proclaims that he has found that “death was not an evil, but a blessing.” [16]
Of equal importance for the private religion of Greece were the Orphic mystic societies, bearing a Thraco-Phrygian tradition into Greece, and associated originally with the name of Dionysus, and afterwards with Sabazius also and the later cult-ideas of Phrygia. [17] The full account of the Dionysiac mysteries would demand a critical study of the Dionysiac religion as a whole, as well as of the private sects that sprang up under its shadow. ”

“ Hence the omen-seeker comes to prefer the sacrificed animal, as likely to be filled with the divine spirit through contact with the altar. And, again, if we are to understand the most primitive thought, we probably ought to conceive of it as regarding the omen not as a mere sign, but in some confused sense as a cause of that which is to happen. By sympathetic magic the flight of the bird, or the appearance of the entrails, is mysteriously connected, as cause with effect, with the event which is desired or dreaded. ”

“ We must also be on our guard against supposing that when Pagan or Christian writers refer vaguely to “mysteria,” they always have the Eleusinian in their mind.
The questions that the critical analysis of all the evidence may hope to solve are mainly these: (a) What do we know or what can we infer concerning the personality of the deities to whom the Eleusinian mysteries were originally consecrated, and were new figures admitted at a later period? (b) When was the mystery taken over by Athens and opened to all Hellas, and what was the state-organization provided? ”

“ Gradually, as Greek ethics escaped the bondage of ritual and evolved the idea of spiritual purity of conscience, this found eloquent expression in the utterances imputed to the Pythoness. [28] Many of these are no doubt literary fictions; but even these are of value as showing the popular view about the oracular god, whose temple and tripod were regarded as the shrine and organ of the best wisdom and morality of Greece. The downfall of Greek liberty before Macedon destroyed the political influence of the Delphic oracle ”