- hammedan legend Moses and Joshua lose the fish, and
in his place Chidher, the teacher of wisdom, appears (like the boy Jesus in the temple); so does the corn god, lost and believed to be dead, suddenly arise again from his mother into renewed youth. (That Christ was laid in the manger is suggestive of fodder. Robertson, therefore, places the manger as parallel to the liknon.)
We understand from these accounts why the Eleusinian mysteries were for the mystic so rich in comfort for the hope of a better world. A beautiful Eleusinian epitaph shows this:
"Truly, a beautiful secret is proclaimed by the blessed Gods!
Mortality is not a curse, but death a blessing!"
The hymn to Demeter[46] in the mysteries also says the same:
"Blessed is he, the earth-born man, who hath seen this!
Who hath not shared in these divine ceremonies,
He hath an unequal fate in the obscure darkness of death."
Immortality is inherent in the Eleusinian symbol; in a church song of the nineteenth century by Samuel Preiswerk we discover it again:
"The world is yours, Lord Jesus,
The world, on which we stand,
Because it is thy world
It cannot perish.
Only the wheat, before it comes
Up to the light in its fertility,
Must die in the bosom of the earth
First freed from its own nature.
