The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 34, August, 1860. Various

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      And ever since amongst them I have ridden,

      A head and shoulders taller than the best;

      And ever since my days have been of gold,

      My nights have been of silver.—God is just!

      ELEUSINIA.1

      THE SAVIOURS OF GREECE

      Life, in its central idea, is an entire and eternal solitude. Yet each individual nature so repeats—and is itself repeated in—every other, that there is insured the possibility both of a world-revelation in the soul, and of a self-incarnation in the world; so that every man's life, like Agrippa's mirror, reflects the universe, and the universe is made the embodiment of his life,—is made to beat with a human pulse.

      We do all, therefore,—Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, or Saxon,—claim kinship both with the earth and the heavens: with the sense of sorrow we kneel upon the earth, with the sense of hope we look into the heavens.

      The two Presences of the Eleusinia,—the earthly Demeter,2 the embodiment of human sorrow, and the heavenly Dionysus,3 the incarnation of human hope,—these are the two Great Presences of the Universe; about whom, as separate centres,—the one of measureless wanderings, the other of triumphant rest,—we marshal, both in the interpretations of Reason and in the constructions of our Imagination, all that is visible or that is invisible,—whatsoever is palpable in sense or possible in idea, in the world which is or the world to come. Incarnations of the life within us, in its two developments of Sorrow and Hope,—they are also the centres through which this life develops itself in the world: it is through them that all things have their genesis from the human heart, and through them, therefore, that all things are unveiled to us.

      But these Two Presences have their highest interest and significance as foci of the religious development of the race: and inasmuch as all growth is ultimately a religious one, it is in this phase that their organic connections with life are widest and most profound. As such they appear in the Eleusinia; and in all mythology they furnish the only possible key for the interpretation of its mystic symbolism, its hieroglyphic records, and its ill-defined traditions.

      Accordingly we find that all mythology naturally and inevitably flows about these centres into two distinct developments, which are indicated,—

      1. In Nature; inasmuch as they are first made manifest through symbols which point to the two great forces, the active and the passive, which are concerned in all natural processes (sol et terra subjacens soli); and,

      2. In the primitive belief among all nations, that men are the offspring of the earth and the heavens,—and in the worship equally prevalent of the sun, the personal Presence of the heavens, as Saviour Lord, and of the earth as sorrowing Lady and Mother.

      Why the earth, in this primitive symbolism and worship, was represented as the Sorrowing One, and the sun as Saviour, is evident at a glance. It was the bosom of the earth which was shaken with storm and rent with earthquake. She was the Mother, and hers was the travail of all birth; in sorrow she forever gathered to herself her Fate-conquered children; her sorrowful countenance she veiled in thick mists, and, year after year, shrouded herself in wintry desolation: while he was the Eternal Father, the Revealer of all things, he drove away the darkness, and in his presence the mist became an invisible exhalation; and, as out of darkness and death, he called into birth the flowers and the numberless forests,—even as he himself was every morning born anew out of darkness,—so he called the children of the earth to a glorious rising in his light. Everything of the earth was inert, weighing heavily upon the sense and the heart, only waiting its transfiguration and exaltation through his power, until it should rise into the heavens; which was the type of his translation to himself of his grief-oppressed children.

      Under these symbols our Lord and Lady have been worshipped by an overwhelming majority of the human race. They swayed the ancient world, from the Indians by the Ganges, and the Tartar tribes, to the Britons and Laplanders of Northwestern Europe,—having their representatives in every system of faith,—in the Hindu Isi and Isana, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, the Assyrian Venus and Adonis, the Demeter and Dionysus of Greece, the Roman Ceres and Bacchus, and the Disa and Frey of Scandinavia,—in connection with most, if not all, of whom there existed festivals corresponding, in respect of their meaning and use, with the Grecian Eleusinia.

      Moreover, the various divinities of any one mythology—for example, the Greek—were at first only representatives of partial attributes or incidental functions of these Two Presences. Thus, Jove was the power of the heavens, which, of course, centred in the sun; Apollo is admitted to have been only another name for the sun; Æsculapius represents his healing virtues; Hercules his saving strength; and Prometheus, who gave fire to men, as Vulcan, the god of fire, was probably connected with Eastern fire-worship, and so in the end with the worship of the sun. Some of the goddesses come under the same category,—such as Juno, sister and wife of Jove, who shared with him his aerial dynasty; as also Diana, who was only the reflection of Apollo,4 as the moon of the sun, carrying his power on into the night, and exercising among women the functions which he exercised among men. The representatives of our Lady, on the other hand, are such as the ancient Rhea,—Latona, with her dark and starry veil,—Tethys, the world-nurse,—and the Artemis of the East, or Syrian Mother; to say nothing of Oreads, Dryads, and Nereids, that without number peopled the mountains, the forests, and the sea.

      The confusion of ancient mythology did not so much regard its subjective elements as its external development, and even here is easily accounted for by the mingling of tribes and nations, hitherto isolated in their growth,—but who, as they came together, in their mutual recognition of a common faith under different names and rites, must inevitably have introduced disorder into the external symbolism. But even out of this confusion we shall find the whole Pantheon organized about two central shrines,—those of the Mater Dolorosa and the Dominus Salvator,—which are represented also in Christendom, though detached from natural symbols, in the connection of Christianity with the worship of the Virgin.

      The Eleusinia, collecting together, as it did, all the prominent elements of mythology, furnishes, in its dramatic evolution through Demeter and Dionysus, the highest and most complete representation of ancient faith in both of its developments. In a former paper, we have endeavored to give this drama its deepest interpretation by pointing to the human heart as the central source of all its movements. We shall now ask our readers to follow us out into these movements themselves,—that, as before we saw how the world is centred in each human soul, we may now see how each soul develops itself in the world; for thither it is that the ever-widening cycles of the Eleusinian epos will inevitably lead us.

      And first as an epos of sorrow: though centring in the earthly Demeter, yet its movement does not limit itself by the remembrance of her nine days' search; but, in the torch-light procession of the fifth night, widens indefinitely and mysteriously in the darkness, until it has inclosed all hearts within the circuit of its tumultuous flight. Thus, by some secret sympathy with her movements, are gathered together about the central Achtheia all the Matres Dolorosoe,—our Ladies of Sorrow;—for, like her, they were all wanderers.

      They were so by necessity. All unrest involves loss, and thus leads to search. It matters not if the search be unsuccessful; though the gadfly sting as sharply the next moment as it did the last, still so must continue her wanderings. Therefore that Jew, whose mythic fate it is to wait forever upon the earth, the victim of an everlasting sorrow, is also an everlasting wanderer. All suffering necessitates movement,—and when the suffering is intense, the movement passes over into flight.

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