of teaching made use of in these
rites: these were [gr legomena], things SAID; [gr deiknumena], things
SHOWN; and [gr drwmena], things PERFORMED or ACTED. (1) I have given
already some instances of things said-texts whispered for consolation in
the neophyte's car, and so forth; of the THIRD group, things enacted,
we have a fair amount of evidence. There were ritual dramas or
passion-plays, of which an important one dealt with the descent of Kore
or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations,
(2) and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in Spring;
another with the sufferings of Psyche and her rescue by Eros, as
described by Apuleius (3)--himself an initiate in the cult of Isis.
There is a parody by Lucian, which tells of the birth of Apollo, the
marriage of Coronis, and the coming of Aesculapius as Savior; there was
the dying and rising again of Dionysus (chief divinity of the Orphic
cult); and sometimes the mystery of the birth of Dionysus as a holy
child. (4) There was, every year at Eleusis, a solemn and lengthy
procession or pilgrimage made, symbolic of the long pilgrimage of the
human soul, its sufferings and deliverance.

(1) Cheetham, op. cit., pp. 49-61 sq.

(2) See Farnell, op. cit., iii. 158 sq.

(3) See The Golden Ass.

(4) Farnell, ii, 177.

"Almost always," says Dr. Cheetham, "the suffering of a god--suffering
followed by triumph--seems to have been the subject of the sacred
drama." Then occasionally to the Neophytes, after taking part in the
pilgrimage, and when their minds had been prepared by an ordeal of
darkness and fatigue and terrors, was accorded a revelation of Paradise,
and even a vision of Transfiguration--the form of the Hierophant
himself, or teacher of the Mysteries, being seen half-lost in a blaze
of light. (1) Finally, there was the eating of food and drinking
of barley-drink from the sacred chest (2)--a kind of Communion or
Eucharist.

(1) Ibid., 179 sq.

(2) Ibid., 186. Sacred chests, in which holy things were kept,
figure frequently in early rites and legends--as in the case of the ark
of the Jewish tabernacle, the ark or box carried in celebrations of the
mysteries of Bacchus (Theocritus, Idyll xxvi), the legend of Pandora's
box which contained the seeds of all good and evil, the ark of Noah
which saved all living creatures from the flood, the Argo of the
argonauts, the moonshaped boat in which Isis floating over the waters
gathere