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Updated: May 18, 2025
Besides, Dionysus must not be too closely identified with the Bacchanalian orgies, which were only a perversion of rites which retained their original purity in the Eleusinia: and this latter institution, it must be remembered, was from the first under the control of the state, and that state at the time the most refined on the face of the earth.
Stage after stage we have proceeded with him through the MYSTERIES OF LIFE. The Eleusinia are closed, and the crowning libation poured. And Alice! Will the world blame us if you are left happy at the last? We are daily banishing from our law-books the statutes that disproportion punishment to crime. Daily we preach the doctrine that we demoralize wherever we strain justice into cruelty.
But the plain of Ceres Eleusinia, and the offer of victory to the Athenians, if they fought in their own territories, recalled them again, and transferred the war into the country of Attica.
Everything lives with a human breath, as everything should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk, to whom all the world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. Of course there are lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars on us in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian Eleusinia, to be told that "the gentle Chibiabos Sang in tones of deep emotion!"
This manifest vision having appeared to Arimnestus, when he awoke he sent for the most aged and experienced of his countrymen, with whom communicating and examining the matter, he found that near Hysiae, at the foot of Mount Cithaeron, there was a very ancient temple called the temple of Ceres Eleusinia and Proserpine.
Stage after stage we have proceeded with him through the MYSTERIES OF LIFE. The Eleusinia are closed, and the crowning libation poured. And Alice! Will the world blame us if you are left happy at the last? We are daily banishing from our law-books the statutes that disproportion punishment to crime. Daily we preach the doctrine that we demoralize wherever we strain justice into cruelty.
Examples of this are so numerous that we have no space for a minute consideration. But certainly it is plain that the Eleusinia, as being more central, more purely spiritual, must in the thought of Greece have risen high above the drama. The very dress in which the mystae were initiated was preserved as most sacred or deposited in the temple.
Not to Demeter, then, nor even to Isis, do the Eleusinia primarily point, but to the human heart. We no longer look at them; henceforth they are within us. Long has this mystic mother, the wonder of the world, waited for the revelation of her face. "I am the First and the Last, mother of gods and men. As deep as is my mystery, so deep is my sorrow. For, lo! all generations are mine.
They swayed the ancient world, from the Indians by the Ganges, and the Tartar tribes, to the Britons and Laplanders of Northwestern Europe, having their representatives in every system of faith, in the Hindu Isi and Isana, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, the Assyrian Venus and Adonis, the Demeter and Dionysus of Greece, the Roman Ceres and Bacchus, and the Disa and Frey of Scandinavia, in connection with most, if not all, of whom there existed festivals corresponding, in respect of their meaning and use, with the Grecian Eleusinia.
But the final word has been uttered: "Conx Ompax." The rite is consummated, and we are epoptæ forever! One day more, and the Eleusinia themselves are completed. As in the beginning by lustration and sacrifices we conciliated the favor of the gods, so now by libation we finally commend ourselves to their care.
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