the West. Thus is finished this Epos, or, as
Clemens Alexandrinus calls it, the "mystical drama" of the Eleusinia.

Now, reader, you have seen the Mysteries. And what do they mean? Let us
take care lest we deceive ourselves, as many before us have done, by
merely _looking_ at the Eleusinia.

Oh, this everlasting staring! This it is that leads us astray. That old
stargazer, with whom Aesop has made us acquainted, deserved, indeed, to
fall into the well, no less for his profanity than his stupidity. Yet
this same star-gazing it is that we miscall reflection. Thus, in our
blank wonder at Nature, in our naked analysis of her life, expressed
through long lists of genera and species and mathematical calculations,
as if we were calling off the roll of creation, or as if her depth of
meaning rested in her vast orbs and incalculable velocities,--in all
this we fail of her real mystery.

To mere external seeming, the Eleusinia point to Demeter for their
interpretation. To _her_ are they consecrated,--of her grief are they
commemorative; out of reverence to her do the _mystae_ purify themselves
by lustration and by the sacrifice that may not be tasted; she it is who
is symbolized, in the procession of the basket, as our Great Mother,
through the salt, wool, and sesame, which point to her bountiful
gifts,--while by the poppies and pomegranates it is hinted that she
nourishes in her heart some profound sorrow: by the former, that she
seeks to bury this sorrow in eternal oblivion,--by the latter, that it
must be eternally reiterated. The procession of the torches defines the
sorrow; and by this wild, despairing search in the darkness do we know
that her daughter Proserpine, plucking flowers in the fields of light,
has been snatched by ruthless Pluto to the realm of the Invisible. Then
by the procession of Iacchus we learn that divine aid has come to the
despairing Demeter; by the coming of, Aesculapius shall all her wounds
be healed; and the change in the evening from the _mystae_ to _epoptae_ is
because that now to Demeter, the cycle of her grief being accomplished,
the ways of Jove are made plain,--even his permission of violence from
unseen hands; to _her_ also is the final libation.

But the story of the stolen Proserpina is itself an afterthought, a
fable invented to explain the Mysteries; and, however much it may have
modified them in detail, certainly could not have been their ground. Nor
is the sorrowing Demeter herself ad