ed
Australians, or Yao, or in Greece. Lobeck did his best to minimise the
testimony to the higher element in the Eleusinia, but without avail. The
study of early, barbaric, savage, classical, Egyptian, or Indian
religions should not be one-sided. Men have always been men, for good as
well as for evil; and religion, almost everywhere, is allied with ethics
no less than it is overrun by the parasite of myth, and the survival of
magic in ritual. The Mother and the Maid were "Saviours" ([Greek text]),
"holy" and "pure," despite contradictory legends. {77} The tales of
incest, as between Zeus and Persephone, are the result of the
genealogical mania. The Gods were grouped in family-relationships, to
account for their companionship in ritual, and each birth postulated an
amour. None the less the same deities offered "salvation," of a sort,
and were patrons of conduct.

Greek religion was thus not destitute of certain chief elements in our
own. But these were held in solution, with a host of other warring
elements, lustful, cruel, or buffooning. These elements Greece was
powerless to shake off; philosophers, by various expedients, might
explain away the contradictory myths which overgrew the religion, but
ritual, the luck of the State, and popular credulity, were tenacious of
the whole strange mingling of beliefs and practices.

* * * * *

The view taken of the Eleusinia in this note is hardly so exalted as that
of Dr. Hatch. "The main underlying conception of initiation was that
there were elements in human life from which the candidate must purify
himself before he could be fit to approach God." The need of
purification, ritual and moral, is certain, but one is not aware of
anything in the purely popular or priestly religion of Greece which
exactly answers to our word "God" as used in the passage cited.
Individuals, by dint of piety or of speculation, might approach the
conception, and probably many did, both in and out of the philosophic
schools. But traditional ritual and myth could scarcely rise to this
ideal; and it seems exaggerated to say of the crowded Eleusinian throng
of pilgrims that "the race of mankind was lifted on to a higher plane
when it came to be taught that only the pure in heart can see God." {78}
The black native boys in Australia pass through a purgative ceremony to
cure them of selfishness, and afterwards the initiator points to the blue
vault of sky, bidding them behold "Our Father, Mung