The question of supreme interest now arises : What was the mystic ceremony in the hall; what was said and what was done? We can distinguish two grades in the celebration; the greater was the riXEct and grorrudt, the full and satisfying celebration, to which only those were admitted who had passed the lesser stage at least a year before. As regards the actual ritual in the hall of the mystae, much is still uncertain. That there was some kind of holy pageant or play, the accusations against Aeschylus and Alcibiades would suffice to prove, and Porphyry speaks of the hierophant and the bctboi)xos acting divine parts. What the sub ject of this drama was may be gathered partly from the words of Clement—"Deo (Demeter) and Kore became the personages of a mystic drama, and Eleusis with its actbaxos celebrates the wandering, the abduction and the sorrow" (Protrept., p. 1 2, Potter), supported by Apuleius (Met. vi., 2). We may believe then that the great myth of the mother's sorrow, the loss and the partial recovery of her beloved was part of the Eleusinian passion-play. Did it also include a lEpos 76,u,os? We should naturally expect that the sacred story acted in the mystic pageant would close with the scene of reconciliation, such as a holy marriage of the god and the goddess. But the evidence that this was so is mainly indirect, apart from a doubtful passage in Asterius, a writer of questionable authority in the 4th century A.D. (Econom. martyr. p. 194, Combe). At any rate, if a holy marriage formed part of the passion-play, it may well have been acted with solemnity and delicacy. We have no reason to believe that even to a modern taste any part of the ritual would appear coarse or obscene; even Clement, who brings a vague charge of obscenity against all mysteries in general, does not try to sub stantiate it in regard to the Eleusinia, and we hear from another Christian writer of the scrupulous purity of the hierophant.
It would be interesting to know if the birth of a holy child, a babe Iacchus, for example, was a motive of the mystic drama.
The question seems at first sight to be decided by a definite state ment of Hippolytus (Philosoph. 5, 8), that at a certain moment in the mysteries the hierophant cried aloud : "The lady-goddess Brimo has borne Brimos the holy child." But a careful con sideration of the context almost destroys the value of his au thority. For he does not pretend to be a first-hand witness, but admits that he is drawing from Gnostic sources, and he goes on at once to speak of Attis and his self-mutilation. The formula may then refer to the Sabazian-Phrygian mystery, which the Gnostics with their usual spirit of religious syncretism would have no scruple in identifying with the Eleusinian. And the archaeological evidence that has been supposed to support the statement of Hippolytus is deceptive.
The simple structure of the building and the absence of any reference, in the many inscriptions, to expenses for scenery or the like forbid us to suppose that there was any elaborate staging. The pageant-play produced its effect by means of gorgeous raiment, torches and stately figures.
But the mystic action included more than the pageant-play. The hierophant revealed certain holy objects to the eyes of the assembly. There is reason to suppose that these included certain primitive idols of the goddesses of immemorial sanctity; and, if we accept a statement of Hippolytus (loc. cit.) we must believe
that the epoptai were also shown "that great and marvellous mystery of perfect revelation, a cut corn-stalk." The value of this definite assertion, which appears to be an explicit revelation of the secret, would be very great, if we could trust it ; but un fortunately it occurs in the same suspicious context as the Brimo-Brimos formula, and we again suspect the same uncritical confusion of Eleusinian with Phrygian ritual, for we know that Attis himself was identified in his mysteries with the "reaped corn," the araxus Iii.rros, almost the very phrase used by Hippol ytus. Only, it is in the highest degree probable, whether Hippol ytus knew anything or not, that a corn-token was shown among the sacred things of a mystery which possessed an original agra rian significance and was intended partly to consecrate and to foster the agricultural life. But to say this is by no means the same as to admit the view of Lenormant' and Dr. Jevons' that the Eleusinians worshipped the actual corn, or revered it as a clan-totem. For of direct corn-worship or of totemism there is no trace either at Eleusis or elsewhere in Greece.
divinity', for there is no evidence that Demeter was identified with the corn, still less with the barley-meal of which the Kvicethv was compounded. Nor is it likely that the sacrament was the pivot of the whole mystery or was part of the essential act of the mirricas itself. In the first place we have an almost certain representation of the Eleusinian sacrament on an archaic vase in Naples', probably of Attic provenance, and the artistic repro duction of a holy act would have been impious and dangerous, if this had belonged to the inner circle of the mystery. Again, there is no mention of sacrament or sacrifice among the five essential parts of given by Theo Smyrnaeus, nor in the imaginary narrative of the late rhetorician Sopatros (Rhet. Graec. viii., 121) who supposes the strange case of a man being initiated by the goddesses in a dream: they admit him to their full com munion merely by telling him something and showing him some thing.