Chapter X: Orphic Mysteries (4)

In all probability the development of Dionysos from child to man was helped and precipitated by his appropriation of the vine—a spirit of intoxication will be worshipped by man as much and perhaps more than by women. But the interesting thing about Dionysos is that, develope as he may, he bears to the end, as no other god does, the stamp of his matriarchal origin. He can never rid himself of the throng of worshipping women, he is always the nursling of his Maenads. Moreover the instruments of his cult are always not his but his mother’s. It is not enough to say that all orgiastic cults have analogies, nor, as is usually maintained, that the worship of Kybele came in classical times from Asia Minor, and was _contaminated_ with that of Dionysos. All this is true, but the roots of the analogy lie deeper down. The Mother and the Son were together from the beginning. Brimos never came to Eleusis without Brimo. Demeter at Eleusis did not borrow her cymbals from Rhea; she had her own, and Dionysos shared them. Pindar knows it, if only half consciously:

‘Or this, O Thebes, thy soul hath for its pride,
That Dionysos thou to birth didst bring,
Him of the flowing hair, who sits beside
Deo for whom the brazen cymbals ring.’

Strabo[1393], as we have already seen (p. 375), knew that the orgies of Thrace and Phrygia and Crete were substantially the same, that Kuretes and Satyrs and Korybants, attendants on the Son, are also satellites of the Mother—and he cites Euripides[1394]. The Bacchae never forget that their worship is of the Mother as of the Son:

‘But the Timbrel, the Timbrel is another’s,
And away to Mother Rhea it must wend;
And to our holy singing from the Mother’s
The mad Satyrs carried it, to blend
In the dancing and the cheer
Of our third and perfect Year;
And it serves Dionysos in the end!’

But the modern mind, obsessed and limited by a canonical Olympus, an Olympus which is ‘all for the Father,’ has forgotten the Great Mother, robbed the Son of half his grace, and left him desolate of all kinship save adoption.

It is not hard to see why at Eleusis the mother of Dionysos should fade into obscurity, fade so all but entirely that save for the one mention in the _Philosophoumena_ we should have had no certainty of the birth of the holy child. Eleusis, before the coming of Eumolpos and Dionysos, had its Mother-goddess Demeter, and she would not lightly brook a rival. The old matriarchal couple, the Mother and the Maid, who though they were two persons were yet but one goddess, had for their foster-child now one local hero, now another, now Demophon, now and chiefly Triptolemos. At the coming of the northern Mother and Son, of Brimo and Brimos or Semele and Dionysos, matters had to be adjusted between the immigrant and the indigenous divinities. The northern Mother fades almost wholly, but in the Mysteries her Thessalian name is still proclaimed aloud. The attributive child Brimos is merged, partly in the Athenian Iacchos, partly in the local hero Triptolemos, who, to meet him half way, descended from his high estate as local chieftain to become a beautiful boy in a chariot drawn by snakes.

The hopeless fusion and confusion is well evidenced by monuments like the relief from Eleusis[1395] in fig. 161. Here are the Mother and the Maid, the Mother with her sceptre, the Maid with her torch, and between them is a boy, their nursling. Is he Triptolemos, is he Iacchos? The question may be asked, learned monographs may be and have been written in favour of either name, but it is a question that can never certainly be answered. He is the young male divinity of Eleusis, the nursling of the goddesses; beyond that we cannot go.

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The rite of the Sacred Marriage and the Birth of the Holy Child have been considered in detail because they were, I believe, _the_ central mystery. Asterius[1396], in his ‘Encomium on the Blessed Martyrs’ already cited, protests against the Eleusinian Mysteries as the head and front of heathen idolatry and speaks of the Sacred Marriage as its crowning act. ‘Are not the Mysteries at Eleusis the chief act of your worship and does not the Attic people and the whole land of Hellas assemble that it may accomplish a rite of folly? Is there not there performed the descent into darkness, the venerated congress of the Hierophant with the priestess, of him alone with her alone? Are not the torches extinguished and does not the vast and countless assemblage believe _that in what is done by the two in darkness is their salvation_?’

Making all allowance for the fact that Christian Fathers naturally focus their attention on rites they chose to regard as immoral, it is yet abundantly clear that at Eleusis the Marriage and the Birth were the culminating ritual acts, acts by which _union with the divine_, the goal of all mystic ceremonial, was at first held to be actually effected, later symbolized. Preceded by rites of purification such as the Liknophoria, amplified, emphasized by endless subordinate scenes, reenacted in various mythological forms, as e.g. in the rape of Persephone, they yet remained at Eleusis, at Samothrace and elsewhere, _the_ cardinal mysteries. Man makes the rites of the gods in the image of his human conduct. The mysteries of these man-made gods are but the eternal mysteries of the life of man. The examination of endless various and shifting details would lead us no further.

Before we leave the Sacred Marriage, an ethnographical point of some interest remains to be considered.

_g. Cretan influence on the mysteries at Eleusis._

In Crete we found the _Omophagia_ and the Mother, but no marriage rite, and yet there is evidence that makes it highly probable that Demeter and her marriage developed in Crete and came thence to Eleusis.

Such is the tradition of the Homeric Hymn[1397]:

‘Dos is the name that to me my holy mother gave,
And I am come from Crete across the wide sea-water wave.’

This may be a mere chance pirate legend, but such legends often echo ethnographical fact.

Again at the close of the Hymn[1398] the poet seems to remember the island route by which Demeter passed to Thessaly:

‘Goddess who holdst the fragrance of Eleusis in thy hands,
Mistress of rocky Antron and Paros’ sea-girt strand,
Lady revered, fair Deo, gift-giver year by year,
Thou and thy fair Persephone, to us incline thine ear.’

Whether Demeter brought her daughter from Crete must remain for the present unconsidered; but from mythology, not ritual, we learn that in Crete she had a Sacred Marriage. Calypso, recounting the tale of ancient mortal lovers of whom the gods were jealous, says[1399]:

‘So too fair-haired Demeter once in the spring did yield
To love, and with Iasion lay in a new-ploughed field.
But not for long she loved him, for Zeus high overhead
Cast on him his white lightning and Iasion lay dead.’

It is one of the lovely earth-born myths that crop up now and again in Homer, telling of an older simpler world, of gods who had only half emerged from the natural things they are, real earth-born flesh and blood creatures, not splendid phantoms of an imagined Olympic pageant. To smite and slay these primitive divinities of the order he supersedes, Zeus is always ready with his virtuous thunderbolt.

Hesiod[1400], if later in date, is almost always earlier in thought than Homer. He knows of the Marriage and knows that it was in Crete:

‘Demeter brought forth Ploutos; a glorious goddess she,
And yet she loved Iasion, a mortal hero he.
In Crete’s rich furrows lay they; glad and kindly was the birth
Of him whose way is on the sea and over all the Earth.
Happy, happy is the mortal who doth meet him as he goes,
For his hands are full of blessings and his treasure overflows.’

Theocritus[1401] knows that this Marriage of Iasion was a Mystery:

‘Oh, happy, happy, in his changeless fate,
Endymion dreaming; happy, Love, and great
Iasion, who won the mystic joy
That ye shall never learn, Unconsecrate!’

Hesiod is all husbandman; he knows of no mystery child[1402], only of the old agricultural mimetic rite and the child who is the fruits of the earth and of the sea. Zeus with his thunder has not yet come to make of innocent bliss a transgression. Hesiod might have written the ancient tag preserved for us by his scholiast[1403]:

‘Ah for the wheat and barley, O child Ploutos.’

The writer of the Homeric Hymn[1404] is altogether Zeus-ridden, hence many of the anomalies and absurdities of the tale he so beautifully tells; he is Homeric in his aloofness from things primitive, he is also Orphic in his emphasis on the spiritual bliss of the initiated and in his other-worldliness. He is concerned to show their future weal rather than their present wealth:

‘Blessed is he among men who is given these rites to know,
But the uninitiate man, the man without, must go
To no such happy lot when dead in the dusk below.’

And yet, so strong is the ancient agricultural tradition and association of the rites that the primitive sacred child of Crete, the Wealth-god, reemerges[1405] almost automatically at the close, though in half abstracted fashion, born of heaven not earth:

‘Then when the goddess all things had ordered of her grace,
She fared to high Olympus, their great assembly place.
There do they dwell with Father Zeus, who thunders through the sky,
Holy and reverend are their names, and great his earthly joy
Whom they vouchsafe to love. Above all mortals is he blest,
Swiftly they send to his great home Ploutos to be his guest.’

The mimetic marriage of Crete, a bit of sympathetic magic common to many primitive peoples, became a cardinal _mystic_ rite. Diodorus[1406] in a very instructive passage tells us that in Crete ‘mysteries’ were not mysterious, and we shall not, I think, be far wrong if we suppose that the Cretan non-mysterious form was the earlier. After discussing Cretan mythology he says: ‘The Cretans in alleging that they from Crete conferred on other mortals the services of the gods, sacrifices and rites appertaining to mysteries, bring forward this point as being to their thinking the principal piece of evidence. The rite of initiation, which is perhaps the most celebrated of all, is that which is performed by the Athenians at Eleusis, and the rite at Samothrace and that in Thrace among the Cicones, the country of Orpheus, inventor of rites, all these are imparted as mysteries, whereas in Crete at Cnossos the custom from ancient times was that these rites should be communicated openly and to all, and things that among the other peoples were communicated in secrecy among the Cretans no one concealed from any one who wished to know.’

The Cretans, like most patriots, went a little too far. The gods had not left themselves without witness among other peoples till they, the elect Cretans, started on their missionary enterprise. But, as regards certain mystery rites, as regards two of those discussed in detail, the Omophagia and the Sacred Marriage, may not their statement have been substantially true? Before the downward movement of Dionysos from the North, may there not have been an upward movement of (shall we say) Orpheus from the South? May not the Orphic mysteries of the Mother have started, or at least fully developed, in matriarchal Crete[1407], Crete that was to the end ‘of the Mother,’ that refused even in her language to recognize the foolish empty patriarchalism, ‘Father-land’? In Crete the discoveries of Mr Arthur Evans have shown us a splendid and barbarous civilization, mature, even decadent, before the uprising of Athens. From Crete to Athens came Epimenides, who is but a quasi-historical Orpheus, and with him he brought rites of cleansing. In Cretan ‘Mycenaean’ civilization[1408] and only there, is seen that strange blend of Egyptian and ‘Pelasgian’ that haunted Plutarch and made him say that Osiris was one with Dionysos, Isis with Demeter.

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Diodorus, quoting the local tradition, knows the very route by which the rites of Crete went northward, by way of the islands, by Samothrace home of the mysteries, up to the land of the Cicones. There, it would seem, Orpheus the sober met the raging wine-god, there the Maenads slew him, and repented and upraised his sanctuary. Thence the two religions, so different yet so intimately fused, came down to Greece, a conjoint force, dominant, irresistible. Mysticism and ‘Enthusiasm’ are met together, and, for Greek religion, the last word is said.

Orpheus for all his lyre-playing is a priest or rather a ‘religious.’ Dionysos is, at least as we know him at Athens, less priest than artist. Most primitive religions have δρώμενα, but from the religion of Dionysos sprang the drama. The analogy between δρώμενα, things done, actions, and δρᾶμα, a Thing Acted in the stage sense, has been often observed, but the problem still remains—why was the transition effected in the religion of Dionysos and in his only, why have Athene and Zeus and Poseidon no drama, only δρώμενα?

_h. The Drama of Dionysos and the δρώμενα of Eleusis._

The question would not be raised here but that the answer I would suggest comes mainly from religion, and some stages of the transition are, I believe, to be found in the ritual of Eleusis.

Epic, lyric and dramatic poetry succeed each other in our handbooks and our minds in easy and canonical fashion. Lyric poetry asks no explanation, or finds it instantly in our common human egotism. But we are apt to forget that from the _epos_, the narrative, to the _drama_, the enactment, is a momentous step, one, so far as we know, not taken in Greece till after centuries of epic achievement, and then taken suddenly, almost in the dark, and irrevocably. All we really know of this momentous step is that it was taken some time in the sixth century B.C. and taken in connection with the worship of Dionysos. Surely it is at least possible that the real impulse to the drama lay not wholly in ‘goat-songs’ and ‘circular dancing places’ but also in the cardinal, the essentially dramatic, conviction of the religion of Dionysos, that the worshipper can not only worship, but can become, can _be_, his god[1409]. Athene and Zeus and Poseidon have no drama because no one, in his wildest moments, believed he could become and be Athene or Zeus or Poseidon. It is indeed only in the orgiastic religions that these splendid moments of conviction could come, and, for Greece at least, only in an orgiastic religion did the drama take its rise.

In the rites at Eleusis of which most details are known we have the very last stage of the development before the final step was actually taken, we have δρώμενα on the very verge of _drama_.

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Late authors in describing the Eleusinian rites use constantly the vocabulary of the stage. Take the account of Psellus[1410], whose testimony has been too much neglected. Psellus is recording ‘what the Greeks believe about demons’ and he passes from theology to ritual. ‘Yes and the mysteries of these (demons), as for example those of Eleusis, enact the double story of Deo or Demeter and her daughter Pherephatta or Kore. As in the rite of initiation love affairs are to take place, Aphrodite of the Sea is represented as uprising. Next there is the wedding rite for Kore. And the initiated sing as an accompaniment “I have eaten from the timbrel, I have drunk from the cymbals, I have carried the _kernos_, I have gone down into the bridal chamber.” Then also they enact the birth-pains of Deo. At least there are cries of entreaty of Deo, and there is the draught of gall and the throes of pain. After these there is a goat-legged mime because of what Zeus did to Demeter. After all this there are the rites of Dionysos and the cista and the cakes with many bosses and the initiated to Sabazios and the Klodones and Mimallones who do the rites of the Mother and the sounding cauldron of Thesprotia and the gong of Dodona and a Korybas and a Koures, separate figures, mimic forms of demons. After this is the action of Baubo[1411].’

Psellus shows us the sacred pantomime in full complexity. From other sources we know that it was not all dumb-show, that other words were spoken besides the confession of the ‘tokens.’ Galen[1412] when he is urging his readers to attend to natural science no less than theology says: ‘Lend me then your whole attention even more than you did supposing you were initiated in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries or any other holy rite and gave yourself up wholly _to the things done and the things spoken_ by the Hierophants.’

The fashion in which the ‘things spoken’ supplemented and helped out the ‘things done’ comes out very clearly in the curious fictitious legal case which occurs among the collection of rhetorical exercises made by Sopater[1413]. A young man dreams that he is initiated, and sees the ‘things done.’ He recounts the ‘things done’ to an initiated friend and asks if they correspond to the actual Eleusinian rite. The friend nods assent. Is the friend guilty of impiety, i.e. has he revealed the ‘things done’ to one uninitiated? No, argues the initiated man, for the dreamer was really initiated by the goddesses themselves; only one thing was lacking to him, he had not heard the voice of the hierophant so as to understand clearly the sense of the symbols uttered by him. The symbols uttered must have been words corresponding to, explanatory of, the things done, dark enough no doubt, but felt to be illuminating. The Hierophant acted as sacred showman to the pantomime. Here we have brought into close, inevitable conjunction the narrative element of the epos and the action element of the drama. We have all the apparatus of the stage, the appearances and disappearances, the dancing and the singing, the lights, the voices and the darkness. Religion gave all the circumstances and the scenery, religion woke the instinct of intense impersonation, some genius made the dumb figures speak themselves and tragedy was born.

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Dionysos gave men tragedy to gladden and to greaten their toilsome life on earth. His other great gift was, as has been already shown, the hope that by attaining divinity they would as a necessary consequence attain immortality. To the dim forecast of some sort of after guerdon that Demeter gave, he brought something as near conviction as the human mind can get. Plutarch[1414] writes to his wife when they have lost their little girl, who was so like the father and so dear to the mother, and he bids her remember both her traditional faith and ‘the mystic symbols of the rites of initiation to Dionysos.’ These, he says, will prevent her from thinking that the soul suffers nothing after death, that it ceases to be. He reads into these rites of course his own Platonism; they teach him that the soul is like a bird caught in a cage, caught and recaught ever in new births, that the evil of old age is not its wrinkles and grey hairs but, hardest thing of all, the dimness and staleness of the soul to the memory of things ‘there’ not here; and the soul that leaves the body soon is not cramped and bent but only softly and pliantly moulded and soon shakes its mane and is free, just as fire that is quenched and relighted forthwith flames and sparkles anew. The customs of his country forbade him to make libations for children, and he reads into the old barbarous convention, based on the harmlessness of the child-ghost, the doctrine that children have no part in earth and earthly things, but have passed straightway to a better and more divine fate. Still in the mystic symbols of Dionysos he sees only what was there implicit if only in dim fashion.

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It has been thought that the rites of Eleusis and other Orphic mysteries contained among these ‘things done’ mimetic presentations of a future life, a sort of revelation and instruction for the conduct of the soul in the world below. Elements of this kind, it will later be seen, may easily have been interpolated from Egypt, but for Eleusis we have no certain evidence. The best witness to the faith of the Orphic as to the future life are his own confessions buried with him in his tomb, inscribed happily for us on imperishable gold, and to this witness we must now turn.