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
passage of Herodotus (viii. 65), Who describes the procession of
the mystae as moving along the sacred way from Athens to
Eleusis and as raising the cry Ἴακχε. We find Iacchus the
theme of a glowing invocation in an Aristophanic Ode (Frogs,
324-398), and described as a beautiful “young god”; but he is
first explicitly identified with Dionysus in the beautiful ode of
Sophocles’ Antigone (1119); and that this was in accord with the
popular ritualistic lore is proved by the statement of the scholiast
on Aristophanes (Frogs, 482) that the people at the Lenaea, the
winter-festival of Dionysus, responded to the command of
“Invoke the god!” with the invocation “Hail, Iacchus, son of
Semele, thou giver of wealth!” We are sure, then, that in the
high tide of the Attic religious history Iacchus was the youthful
Dionysus, a name of the great god peculiar to Attic cult; and
this is all that here concerns us to know.
We can now answer the question raised above. This youthful Attic Dionysus has his home at Athens; he accompanies his votaries along the sacred way, filling their souls with the exaltation and ecstasy of the Dionysiac spirit; but at Eleusis he had no temple, altar or abiding home; he comes as a visitor and departs. His image may have been carried into the Hall of the Mysteries, but whether it played any part there in a passion-play we do not know. That he was a primary figure of the essential mystery is hard to believe, for we find no traces of his name in the other Greek communities that at an early period had instituted mysteries on the Eleusinian model. Apart from Iacchus, Dionysus in his own name was powerful enough at Eleusis as in most other localities. And the votaries carried with them no doubt into the hall the Bacchic exaltation of the Iacchus procession and the nightly revel with the god that preceded the full initiation; many of them also may have belonged to the private Dionysiac sects and might be tempted to read a Dionysiac significance into much that was presented to them. But all this is conjecture. The interpretation of what was shown would naturally change somewhat with the changing sentiment of the ages; but the mother and the daughter, the stately and beautiful figures presented to us by the author of the homeric hymn, who says no word of Dionysus, are still found reigning paramount and supreme at Eleusis just before the Gothic invasion in the latter days of Paganism. Triptolemus the apostle of corn-culture, Eubouleus—originally a euphemistic name of the god of the under-world, “the giver of good counsel,” conveying a hint of his oracular functions—these are accessory figures of Eleusinian cult and mythology that may have played some part in the great mystic drama that was enacted in the hall.
The development and organization of the Eleusinia may now be briefly sketched. The legends concerning the initiation of Heracles and the Dioscuri preserve the record of the time when the mysteries were closed against all strangers, and were the privilege of the Eleusinians alone. Now the Homeric hymn in its obvious appeal to the whole of the Greek world to avail themselves of these mysteries gives us to suppose that they had already been thrown open to Hellas; and this momentous change, abolishing the old gentile barriers, may have naturally coincided with, or have resulted from, the fusion of Eleusis and Athens, an event of equal importance for politics and religion which we may place in the prehistoric period. The reign of Peisistratus was an era of architectural activity at Eleusis; but the construction of the μυστικὸς σηκός was one of the achievements of the Periclean administration. Two inscriptions, containing decrees passed during the supremacy of Pericles, the one proclaiming a holy truce of three months for the votaries that came from any Greek community,[1] the other bidding the subject allies and inviting the independent states to send ἀπαρχαί or tithe-offerings of corn to Eleusis,[2] record the farsighted policy of Periclean Athens, her determination to find a religious support for her hegemony.
At least from the 5th century onwards, the external control and all questions of the organization of the mysteries were in the hands of the Athenian state, the rule holding in Attica as elsewhere in Hellas that the state was supreme over the Church. The head of the general management was the king-archon (archon-basileus) who with his paredros and the four “epimeletai” formed a general committee of supervision, and matters of importance connected with the ritual were decided by the Boulé or Ecclesia. But the claim of Eleusis as the religious metropolis was not ignored. The chief of the two priestly families, in whose hands lay the mystic celebration itself and the formal right of admission, was the Eleusinian “gens” of the Eumolpidae; it was to their ancestor that Demeter had entrusted her ὄργια, and the recognition of their claims maintained the principle of apostolic succession. To them belonged the hierophant (ἱεροφάντης), the high priest of the Eleusinia, whose function alone it was to “reveal the orgies,” to show the sacred things, and who alone—or perhaps with his consort-priestess—could penetrate into the innermost shrine in the hall; an impressive figure, so sacred in person that no one could address him by his personal name, and bound, at one period at least, by a rule of celibacy. We hear also of two “hierophantides,” female attendants on the older and younger goddesses. In fact, while the male priest predominates in this ritual, the women play a prominent part: as we should expect, considering that the sister-festival of the Thesmophoria was wholly in their hands.
The other old priestly family was that of the “Kerykes,” to whom the δᾳδοῦχος belonged, “the holder of the torch,” the official second in rank to the ἱεροφάντης. It is uncertain whether this family was of Eleusinian origin; and in the 4th century it seems to have died out, and the office of the δᾳδοῦχος passed into the hands of the Lycomidae, a priestly family of Phlye, suspected of being devotees of Orphism.
Turning now to the celebration itself, we can only sketch the more salient features here. On the 13th of Boedromion, the Attic month corresponding roughly to our September, the Ephebi (q.v.) marched out to Eleusis, and returned to Athens the next day bringing with them the “holy-things” (ἱερά) to the “Eleusinion” in the city; these ἱερά probably included small images of the goddesses. The 16th was the day of the ἀγυρμός, the gathering of the catechumens, when they met to hear the address of the hierophant, called the προρρησις. This was no sermon, but a proclamation bidding those who were disqualified or for some reason unworthy of initiation to depart. The legally qualified were all Hellenes and subsequently all Romans above a certain—very youthful—limit of age, women, and as it appears even slaves; barbarians, and those uncleansed of some notorious guilt, such as homicide, were disqualified. We are sure that there was no dogmatic test, nor would time allow of any searching moral scrutiny, and only the Samothracian rites, in this respect unique in the world of classical religion, possessed a system of confessional. The hierophant appealed to the conscience of the multitude; but we are not altogether sure of the terms of his proclamation, which can only be approximately restored from late Pagan and early Christian writers. We know that he demanded of each candidate that he should be “of intelligible speech (i.e. an Hellene) and pure of hand”; and he catechized him as to his condition of ritualistic purity—the food he had eaten or abstained from. It appears also from Libanius that in the later period at least he solemnly proclaimed that the catechumen should be “pure of soul,”[3] and this spiritual conception of holiness had arisen already in the earlier periods of Greek religious thought. On the other hand we must bear in mind the criticism that Diogenes is said to have passed upon the Eleusinia, that many bad characters were admitted to communion, thereby securing a promise of higher happiness than an uninitiated Epaminondas could aspire to.
An essential preliminary was purification and lustration, and
