Much of the ceremonial there was common knowledge, but the content of the final rite, ‘the Beholding’, will probably never be revealed. That celebrated renegade, Clement of Alexandria, who had once been himself an initiate at Eleusis, pretended in his Exhortation to the Greeks to betray the secret of the last act. Yet it is likely that he did nothing of the kind and merely substituted a cheap little piece of pornography for the ultimate vision. For the violence of his attack on paganism is significant of his secret belief therein, and so timid a creature as Clement could never have brought himself to break a terrible oath. For us it must suffice to recognise that every initiate into the Eleusinian Mysteries was a happy human being, confident in the assurance of a better life after death—of a place in Heaven.
Now, man is always interesting when busy designing his Heaven, because from his ideal structure for an after-life we can learn about that from which he most wants to escape. The secluded prophet or impecunious eremite longing for the glamour of the capital supplied his revelation of the divine city from the stock-in-trade of a grandiose jeweller’s shop bursting with wealth; and the same vision had its ready appeal to many a mediæval mind vowed to a dingy life of poverty. Wandering barbarians of the bitter North, who never knew when the next meal could be thieved, nor whence, conceived a Valhalla in which their unfathomed stomachs could absorb unmeasured food and drink. Sand-whipped and sex-starved Bedouin could find no comfort save in the thought of an all-potent after-life lived in a divine seraglio staffed by delectable houris. By contrast, the industrial revolution, engendering its slums for workers and clammy lodgings for poor students, produced a herd mentality whose greatest fear was solitude. The design for Heaven born of this social group conceives mankind shoaling herring-like at Blackpool or Coney Island, and living in boxed, hygienic tenements as indistinguishable as one sardine-tin from another, since there is no truer security than the inside of an unopened can. Here is that childish concept, the classless society, to which Marx hoped humanity might aspire.
If these are all escapes from the pressing realities, one may ask from what did the Greeks seek refuge? And the answer seems to be from the town, the polis, and those political things that go with it. No ancient town or city was really attractive. Fifth-century Athens, like ‘Turkish’ and like mediæval Athens, was a city of mean, narrow, dust-encumbered streets and dark little dwellings. In the midst was a great agora—a market wide and dignified—while over all towered the mighty, glittering, white temples of the gods cut out against a cobalt sky. “The Athenian,” as Théophile Gautier remarked, “kept his body in a hovel and his soul on the Acropolis.” Aristotle defined man as a political animal, but such a one can find escape and happiness only in becoming a rural animal; and that is what every Greek most wished to be. He loved above all the glory of his countryside, his mountains and glens, his ‘wine-dark’ sea and icy silver fountains. And every traveller soon surfeited with Athens today, every modern man to whom fortune has given the supreme happiness to roam through the flowered landscape of Greece in springtime, will share that love and comprehend the longing for the asphodel meadows of Elysium and carpets of crocus, daffodil, iris, anemone, and thyme. Such was the meadow in which Persephone wandered when Hades, ‘the Host of Many’, swept her away; and the Athenian notion of Heaven as just such a place was exquisitely pictured by Aristophanes.
In 405 B.C. he produced one of his most famous comedies, The Frogs. Himself an initiate in the Eleusinian Mysteries, he gave to the play a chorus of initiates in that part where the scene is laid in Hades, to which Dionysos had gone down-to bring back to earth a true poet; and this chorus describes for us what an Athenian mystes hoped the after-life held for him.
Here in thy home we await thy tread,
O come, Iacchos of high renown.
Dance o’er this meadow, shake on thy head
The berries that cluster thy myrtle crown.
And lead with the beat of thy tireless feet
The holy bands in the mystic rite,
The dance of wantonness and delight,
Where the Graces find their chiefest pleasure,
Thy hallowed worshippers’ sacred measure.
Wake. For the blazing torch he wields,
Daystar of our nightlong festival.
He comes, Iacchos, ablaze are the fields;
See how the old man hears his call,
And all the tears and the long, long years,
As he moves his limbs, fall away and are gone.
Blest god, with thy fiery lamp, lead on
To the flowery marshy floor advancing,
Lead on the youths in the sacred dancing.
Onward! See ye nobly raise
High the Saviour Maiden’s praise.
Queen of sacred ritual,
Save the choirs that praise thee;
Stand Demeter by us all,
Grant that safely all the day
I may dance and I may play.
Come hither, come hither, Iacchos renowned,
Who the loveliest tune for thy revels hast found,
To the home of the goddess come follow thy throng,
And show that untired, be it never so long,
Thou canst travel the road at the worshippers’ side.
Thou lover of dances, O be thou my guide.
Yes, just now, when my eye to the side took a glance,
A sweet pretty girl I observed in the dance,
In her dear little tunic I noticed a tear
And the tip of her breast was just peeping out there
As this charming companion danced on by my side.
Thou lover of dances, O be thou my guide.
On to the fields of roses
The flowery meadow lands,
E’en as our will disposes
This loveliest of bands.
Beside us go the Muses blest
Uniting us in song and jest.
The sun to us is giving
Alone his gladsome ray,
For holy was our living,
And we have learnt the Way;
Did citizen or stranger call,
We had a welcome for them all.{112}“
Aristophanes and countless Athenians and many other Greeks believed the next life held such existence in store, and it may be conceded that of the imagined Heavens we have enumerated, the Greek Elysium and the Moslem paradise are in better taste than the rest.
Demeter, of all the ancient deities, lived on longest in the hearts of the country-folk of Greece, for at the beginning of the last century an ancient statue in Eleusis was still venerated under the name of ‘St. Demetra’—a saint unknown to the Calendar—and was presented with garlands of flowers to secure good harvests. In the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge is the upper half of a colossal statue of a girl basket-bearer made of Pentelic marble in the first century B.C. It was found at Eleusis in 1801 by E. D. Clarke and J. M. Cripps
on the side of the road, immediately before entering the village, and in the midst of a heap of dung, buried as high as the neck, a little beyond the farther extremity of the pavement of the Temple. Yet even this degrading situation had not been assigned to it wholly independent of its ancient history. The inhabitants of the small village which is now situate among the ruins of Eleusis, still regarded this Statue with a very high degree of superstitious veneration. They attributed to its presence the fertility of their land; and it was for this reason that they heaped around it the manure intended for their fields. They believed that the loss of it would be followed by no less calamity than the failure of their annual harvests; and they pointed to the ears of bearded wheat, among the sculptured ornaments, upon the head of the figure, as a never-failing indication of the produce of the soil. The Eleusinians, whose superstitions respecting it were so great that Dr. Chandler paid a large sum for permission to dig near it, related that as often as foreigners came to remove the statue, some disaster ensued. They believed that the arm of any person who offered to touch it with violence would drop o
ff; and said that once being taken from her station by the French, she returned back in the night to her former situation.{113}
On the evening preceding the removal of the statue an ox, loosed from its yoke, butted with its horns against the marble and then ran off, bellowing, into the plain of Eleusis. This roused all the terrors of the peasantry, whose scruples were not removed till the priest of Eleusis arrayed in his vestments struck the first blow with a pickaxe. Even then the people maintained that no ship would ever get safely to port with the statue on board. Curiously enough, the Princessa, a merchantman conveying it home from Smyrna, was wrecked and lost near Beachy Head, though the statue itself was recovered.{114}
Wherever in the Greek Mediterranean world there existed a few square miles of rich soil fitted for the growing of barley or wheat, there one would find the worship of Demeter and Persephone, for mother and daughter naturally co-existed. Their cult was of importance at Syracuse, and especially at Metapontum, in South Italy, perhaps the richest in corn of any Greek colony. In Asia Minor various states honoured Demeter, among them a Carian city where her most famous surviving statue was discovered—the celebrated Demeter of Cnidus of about 330 B.C.{115} This has been called “probably the finest single statue in the British Museum” (Plate XI), an appraisal which some might consider a little rash. The goddess is seated swathed in a large cloak which discloses little of her matronly body; only head and forearms are uncovered, and these are of marble, while the rest is of a roughish stone. Contrasted materials can be very effective, as they are here; and one imagines that the famous Athenian sculptor Leochares, who carved the head, was a fervent believer in the goddess and surely an initiate, for no more emotional, no better figure of a ‘Mater Dolorosa’, mourning for a child that shall achieve resurrection, has been made since mankind took to statuary.
XIII—DIONYSOS
WHEN Homer wrote, rather earlier than 700 B.C., there were twelve Olympian gods, and Dionysos was not of their number. Homer—bard of an ancient and magnificently feudal aristocracy—knew about the god and that he came from foreign parts, but did not attach much importance to a deity, even though reputedly Zeus-begotten, who was then a god of the lesser classes. At some time in the eighth century B.C. wandering bands, ecstatic devotees of this strange god, had moved from regions bordering upon both sides of Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) into Greece. The natives of those regions were called Thracians in Europe and Phrygians in Asia, but were one in kin and language, the tongue being related to Greek and easily learnt. There is some evidence that this cult was also brought by sea, since a Homeric hymn of the seventh century B.C. tells how Tyrsenian pirates—men of Lemnos off the coast of Thrace—were the unwilling means of bringing the god to Greece.
I will tell of Dionysos, the son of glorious Semele, how he appeared on a jutting headland by the shore of the fruitless sea, seeming like a stripling in the first flush of manhood: his rich, dark hair was waving about him, and on his strong shoulders he wore a purple robe. Presently there came swiftly over the sparkling sea Tyrsenian pirates on a well-decked ship—a miserable doom led them on. When they saw him they made signs to one another and sprang out quickly and seizing him straightway put him on board their ship exultingly; for they thought him the son of heave-nurtured kings. They sought to bind him with rude bonds, but the bounds would not hold him and the withes fell far away from his hands and feet: and he sat with a smile in his dark eyes. Then the helmsman understood all and cried out at once to his fellows and said:
“Madmen! what god is this whom you have taken and bind, strong that he is? Not even the well-built ship can carry him. Surely this is either Zeus or Apollo who has the silver bow, or Poseidon, for he looks not like mortal men but like the gods who dwell on Olympus. Come, then, let us set him free upon the dark shore at once: do not lay hands on him, lest he grow angry, and stir up dangerous winds and heavy squalls.”
So said he: but the master chid him with taunting words: “Madman, mark the wind and help us hoist sail on the ship: catch all the sheets. As for this fellow we men will see to him: I reckon he is bound for Egypt or for Cyprus or to the Hyperboreans or further still. But in the end he will speak out and tell us his friends and all his wealth and his brothers, now that providence has thrown him in our way.”
When he had said this, he had mast and sail hoisted on the ship, and the wind filled the sail and the crew hauled taut the sheets on either side. But soon strange things were seen among them. First of all sweet, fragrant wine ran streaming throughout all the black ship and a heavenly smell arose, so that all the seamen were seized with amazement when they saw it. And all at once a vine spread out both ways along the top of the sail with many clusters hanging down from it, and a dark ivy-plant twined about the mast, blossoming with flowers, and with rich berries growing on it; and all the thole-pins were covered with garlands. When the pirates saw all this, then at last they bade the helmsman to put the ship to land. But the god changed into a dreadful lion there on the ship, in the bows, and roared loudly: amidships also he showed his wonders and created a shaggy bear which stood up ravening, while on the forepeak was the lion glaring fiercely with scowling brows. And so the sailors fled into the stern and crowded bemused about the right-minded helmsman, until suddenly the lion sprang upon the master and seized him; and when the sailors saw it they leapt out overboard one and all into the bright sea, escaping from a miserable fate, and were changed into dolphins. But on the helmsman Dionysos had mercy and held him back and made him altogether happy, saying to him: “Take courage, good friend; you have found favour with my heart. I am Boisterous Dionysos whom Cadmus’ daughter Semele bare of union with Zeus.”{116}
The evidence that Dionysos’ worship was brought down by wandering devotees through Macedon and Thessaly to Boeotia, Delphi, Athens, and beyond is based, however, on a very sound tradition. Now the cult which these wandering Thracian bands of men and women brought into Greece was utterly different from the quiet ‘gentlemanly’ cults of the old nobles who worshipped Zeus and the Olympian Family. First and foremost, the worship of Dionysos was intensely mystical, and therefore fraught with possibilities of benefit or of injury to mankind. So long as any part of humanity continues to believe in divinity, to investigate the meaning of deity, and to seek relation with the divine, there is bound to be mysticism, that indefinable thing which can lead men and women into unhealthy, dank, and masochistic actions, or which can involve men and women in the rush and ecstasis of union with nature and creation. The Greeks were very fortunate, since mysticism learnt through Dionysos was not comprehended by way of abnegation and mortification of the flesh, but by way of oblivion and abandonment to the body’s clean desires. But in both forms mystical excess may bring disaster, and it seems likely that in the sixth century B.C. Dionysiac orgia bid fair to injure humanity as much as did monastic asceticism in the fifth century of our era.
A picture of what occurred in Greece is painted in a great drama—some think the greatest of all the plays which Euripides wrote—The Bacchæ. The chief characters are given names out of the old mythologies, but the theme, the action, the thoughts, words, and wild movements of the chorus of Bacchic women are all things of the poet’s own day, of the fifth century B.C. Dionysos, the central figure—at times called Bromios, ‘the Boisterous’—is also Bacchos, for that is another name for him. But each ecstatic, old man and young, each girl and woman, in that throng of his followers is also Bacchos; for this is the heart of the mystery, that when you have given yourself over to this ‘madness’, you are of the god, and the god is of you. He in you drives you to the woods and mountains; you containing the god perform acts that no normal mortal can do. But you are not alone the god, because the other members of the throng are also the god, for the men are Bacchoi and the women Bacchai. ‘Mad ones’, Mænads, is another name for the women; but in both Athens and Delphi they were called Thyiads, of whom more must presently be related. All this is remotely strange to us, but was utterly real in those days, and the chor
us in Euripides’ play expresses the mystic emotion that was known to thousands of women and girls in ancient Greece. They enter clad in fawn-skins over disordered robes and holding each in her hand a thyrsos, a long wand tipped with a bunch of leaves, ivy, or vine.
Who is abroad, who is abroad? Who is within? Let him withdraw, let each man keep his lips hallowed in silence; for I am about to sing to Dionysos the hymns that were ever customary.
Blessed is he who, having the good fortune to know the secret mysteries of the gods, consecrates his life and hath his soul filled with the spirit of Bacchos in the holy purification of his mountain revels; who brandishing the thyrsos aloft, his head crowned with ivy, serves Dionysos. On, on, ye Bacchai, ye who bring Bromios, the god-born of a god, Dionysos, home from the Phrygian hills to the spacious cities of Greece, who bring Bromios...
Soon shall the whole land go forth to dance, as often as Bromios leads his revellers to the mountains, to the mountains; where abides that host of women driven out in madness by Dionysos from beside their looms and shuttles...
Sweet upon the mountains is he who falls to the ground from among the hurrying bands of Bacchantes, clad in his holy garment of fawn-skin, as he pursues the blood of the slain goat...The land is flowing with milk, flowing with wine, flowing with nectar of the bees, and there is a fragrance as of Syrian incense. And the Bacchant with a flaming torch of pinewood fixed to his wand brandishes it as he runs, rousing the straying bands and making them leap up with his cries as he shakes his delicate locks in the wind. And amid the cries of “Evoe” he shouts, “On, ye Bacchai, on, ye Bacchai, hymn Dionysos to the sound of the booming drums, honouring with happy shouts the happy god, with Phrygian cries and clamour, when the sacred melodious pipe sings with sacred sportive music and to its tune ye hurry to the mountains, to the mountains”. And the Bacchanal bounds with nimble feet, happy as a foal with its mother at pasture.{117}
The Twelve Olympians Page 17
