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And who, everywhere, has not felt the mystical influence of that prolonged silence, the mystic silence, from which the very word “mystery” has its origin? Something also there undoubtedly was, which coarser minds might misunderstand. On one day, the initiated went in procession to the sea-coast, where they underwent a purification by bathing in the sea. On the fifth night there was the torchlight procession; and, by a touch of real life in him, we gather from the first page of Plato’s Republic that such processions were popular spectacles, having a social interest, so that people made much of attending them. There was the procession of the sacred basket filled with poppy-seeds and pomegranates. There was the day of rest, after the stress and excitement of the “great night.” On the sixth day, the image of Iacchus, son of Demeter, crowned with myrtle and having a torch in its hand, was carried in procession, through thousands of spectators, along the sacred way, amid joyous shouts and songs. We have seen such processions; we understand how many different senses, and how lightly, various spectators may put on them; how little definite meaning they may have even for those who officiate in them. Here, at least, there was the image itself, in that age, with its close connexion between religion and art, presumably fair. Susceptibility to the impressions of religious ceremonial must always have varied with the peculiarities of individual temperament, as it varies in our own day; and Eleusis, with its incense and sweet singing, may have been as little interesting to the outward senses of some worshippers there, as the stately and affecting ceremonies of the medieval church to many of its own members. In a simpler yet profounder sense than has sometimes been supposed, these things were really addressed to the initiated only.* [10]

[Footnote 10:
*The great Greek myths are, in truth, like abstract forces, which ally themselves to various conditions. ]

We have to travel a long way from the Homeric hymn to the hymn of Callimachus, who writes in the end of Greek literature, in the third century before Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred basket of Demeter, not at the Attic, but at the Alexandrian Eleusinia. He developes, in something of the prosaic spirit of a medieval writer of “mysteries,” one of the burlesque incidents of the story, the insatiable hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he cut down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he finds his opportunities for skilful touches of poetry;–“As the four white horses draw her sacred basket,” he says, “so will the great goddess bring us a white spring, a white summer.” He describes the grove itself, with its hedge of trees, so thick that an arrow could hardly pass through, its pines and fruit-trees and tall poplars within, and the water, like pale gold, running from the conduits. It is one of those famous poplars that receives the first stroke; it sounds heavily to its companion trees, and Demeter perceives that her sacred grove is suffering. Then comes one of those transformations which Plato will not allow. Vainly anxious to save the lad from his ruin, she appears in the form of a priestess, but with the long hood of the goddess, and the poppy in her hand; and there is something of a real shudder, some still surviving sense of a haunting presence in the groves, in the verses which describe her sudden revelation, when the workmen flee away, leaving their axes in the cleft trees.

Of the same age as the hymn of Callimachus, but with very different qualities, is the idyll of Theocritus on the Shepherds’ Journey. Although it is possible to define an epoch in mythological development in which literary and artificial influences began to remodel the primitive, popular legend, yet still, among children, and unchanging childlike people, we may suppose that that primitive stage always survived, and the old, instinctive influences were still at work. As the subject of popular religious celebrations also, the myth was still the property of the people, and surrendered to its capricious action. The shepherds in Theocritus, on their way to celebrate one of the more homely feasts of Demeter, about the time of harvest, are examples of these childlike people; the age of the poets has long since come, but they are of the older and simpler order, lingering on in the midst of a more self-conscious world. In an idyll, itself full of the delightful gifts of Demeter, Theocritus sets them before us; through the blazing summer day’s journey, the smiling image of the goddess is always before them; and now they have reached the end of their journey:–