Chapter 21 § 201. The Mysteries of Eleusis.
A Day in Old Athens, by William Stearns Davis (1910)
Professor of Ancient History at the University of Minnesota
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Chapter XXI. The Great Festivals of Athens.
198 Section201. The Mysteries of Eleusis.--What follows at Eleusis? The "mysteries" are "mysteries" still; we cannot claim initiation and reveal them. There seem to be manifold sacrifices of a symbolic significance, the tasting of sacred "portions" of food and drink--a dim foreshadowing of the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist; especially in the great hall of the Temple of the Mystæ in Eleusis there take place a manner of symbolic spectacles, dramas perhaps one may call them, revealing the origins of Iacchus, the mystical union of Persephone and Zeus, and the final joy of Demeter.
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This certainly we can say of these ceremonies. They seem to have afforded to spiritually minded men a sense of remission of personal sin which the regular religion could never give; they seem also to have conveyed a fair hope of immortality, such as most Greeks doubted. Sophocles tells thus the story: "Thrice blessed are they who behold these mystical rites, ere passing to Hades' realm. They alone have life there. For the rest all things below are evil."[*] And in face of imminent death, perhaps in hours of shipwreck, men are wont to ask one another, "Have you been initiated at Eleusis?"
[*]Sophocles, "Frag." 719.
This resource page is copyright © 2002 N.S. Gill.
