Chapter IV: The Women’s Festivals (1)

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.

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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.’

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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.