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No process, on the other hand, of borrowing from Greece can conceivably account for the Pawnee and Peruvian rites, so closely analogous to those of Hellas. Therefore I see no reason why, if Egypt, for instance, presents parallels to the Eleusinia, we should suppose that the prehistoric Greeks borrowed the Eleusinia from Egypt.
Severe the proof the Grecian youth was doomed to undergo, Before he might what lurks beneath the Eleusinia know Art thou prepared and ripe, the shrine the inner shrine to win, Where Pallas guards from vulgar eyes the mystic prize within? Knowest thou what bars thy way? how dear the bargain thou dost make, When but to buy uncertain good, sure good thou dost forsake?
That the Eleusinia included an ethical element seems undeniable. This one would think probable, a priori, on the ground that Greek Mysteries are an embellished survival of the initiatory rites of savages, which do contain elements of morality. This I have argued at some length in "Myth, Ritual, and Religion."
The representations, through which, under various names, they have repeated to themselves the glory and the tragedy of their life, old festivals once celebrated in Egypt far back beyond the dimmest myths of human remembrance, the mystic drama of the Eleusinia, which we have been considering in its overwhelming sorrow developed in hurried flight, and its lofty hope through triumphal pomp and the significant symbolism of resurrection, the epos and the epic rhapsodies, the circus and the amphitheatre, and even the impetuous song and dance of painted savages, all these, which at first we may pass by with a glance, have for our deeper search a meaning which we can never wholly exhaust.
Everywhere a mystery is kept up about proper names. M. Foucart has another argument, which does not seem more convincing, though it probably lights up the humorous or indecent side of the Eleusinia. What, then, were the secret good offices? In one version of the legend the hosts of Demeter were not Celeus and Metaneira, but Dusaules and Baubo.
The black native boys in Australia pass through a purgative ceremony to cure them of selfishness, and afterwards the initiator points to the blue vault of sky, bidding them behold "Our Father, Mungan-ngaur." This is very well meant, and very creditable to untutored savages: and creditable ideas were not absent from the Eleusinia.
To mere external seeming, the Eleusinia point to Demeter for their interpretation.
They are to be "conscious of no evil": they are to "protect such as have wrought no unrighteousness." Lobeck did his best to minimise the testimony to the higher element in the Eleusinia, but without avail. The study of early, barbaric, savage, classical, Egyptian, or Indian religions should not be one-sided.
The most celebrated of these, the great festival of Eleusinia, sacred to Ce'res and Pros'erpine, was observed every fourth year in different parts of Greece, but more particularly by the people of Athens every fifth year, at Eleu'sis, in Attica.
For the Eleusinia are older than Eleusis, older than Demeter, even the Demeter of Thrace, certainly as old as Isis, who was to Egypt what Demeter was to Greece, the Great Mother of a thousand names, who also had her endlessly repeated sorrow for the loss of Osiris, and in honor of whom the Egyptians held an annual festival.
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