statements are generally uncritical and do not clearly differentiate between the Eleusinian mysteries and others, such as the Orphic, Sabazian, and those of Cybele and Attis.
The questions that the critical analysis of all the evidence may hope to solve are mainly these : (a) What do we know or what can we infer concerning the personality of the deities to whom the Eleusinian mysteries were originally consecrated, and were new figures admitted at a later period? (b) When was the mystery taken over by Athens and opened to all Hellas, and what was the state-organization provided? (c) What was the inner significance, essential content or purport of the Eleusinia, and what was the source of their great influence on Hellas? (d) Can we attribute any ethical value to them, and did they strongly impress the popular belief in immortality? Limits of space allow us only to adumbrate the results that research on the lines of these questions has hitherto yielded.
The paramount divine personalities of the mystery were, in the earliest period of which we have literary record, the mother and the daughter, Demeter and Kore, the latter being never styled Persephone in the official language of Eleusis; while the third figure, the god of the lower world known by the euphemistic names of Pluto (Plouton) and at one time Eubouleus, the ravisher and the husband, is an accessory personage, comparatively in the background. This is the conclusion naturally drawn from the Homeric hymn to Demeter, a composition of great ritualistic value, probably of the 7th century B.C., which describes the ab duction of the daughter, the sorrow and search of the mother, her sitting by the sacred well, the drinking of the or sacred cup, and the legend of the pomegranate. An ancient hymn of Pamphos, from which Pausanias freely quotes and which he regards as genuine', appears to have told much the same story in much the same way. As far as we can say, then, the mother and daughter were there in possession at the very beginning. The other pair of divinities known as d 0€6s, rl Oea that appear in a 5th century inscription and on two dedicatory reliefs found at Eleusis, have been supposed to descend from an aboriginal period of Eleusinian religion when deities were nameless'. But
for various reasons the contrary view is more probable, that OeOs and OElt are later cult-titles of the married pair Pluto-Cora (Plouton-Kore), the personal names being omitted from that feeling of reverential shyness which was specially timid in regard to the sacred names of the deities of the underworld. And it is a fairly familiar phenomenon in Greek religion that two separate titles of the same divinity engender two distinct cults.
The question as to the part played by Dionysus in the Eleusinia is important. Some scholars, like M. Foucart, have supposed that he belonged from the beginning to the inner circle of the mystery; others that he forced his way in at a somewhat later period owing to the great influence of the Orphic sects who captured the stronghold of Attic religion and engrafted the Orphic-Sabazian lEpOs X6-yos, the story of the incestuous union of Dionysus-Saba zius with Demeter-Kore, and of the death and rending of Zagreus, upon the primitive Eleusinian faith. A saner and more careful criticism rejects this view. There is no genuine trace discovered as yet in the inner circle of the mysteries of any characteristically Orphic doctrine; the names of Zagreus and Phanes are nowhere heard, the legend of Zagreus and the death of Dionysus are not known to have been mentioned there. Nor is there any print within or in the precincts of the TEXECT7VILOP, the hall of the Mbcrrat, of the footsteps of the Phrygian deities, Cybele, Attis, Sabazius.
The exact relation of Dionysus to the mysteries involves the question as to the divine personage called Iacchus; who and what was Iacchus? Strabo (p. 468), who is a poor authority on such matters, describes him as "the daemon of Demeter, the founder of the leader of the mysteries." More important is it to note that "Iacchus" is unknown to the author of the Homeric hymn, and that the first literary notice of him occurs in the well-known 38, 3; i. 39, I.