an-ngaur." This is
very well meant, and very creditable to untutored savages: and creditable
ideas were not absent from the Eleusinia. But when we use the quotation,
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," our meaning,
though not very definite, is a meaning which it would be hazardous to
attribute to a black boy,--or to Sophocles. The idea of the New Life
appears to occur in Australian Mysteries: a tribesman is buried, and
rises at a given signal. But here the New Life is rather that of the lad
admitted to full tribal privileges (including moral precepts) than that
of a converted character. Confirmation, rather than conversion, is the
analogy. The number of those analogies of ancient and savage with
Christian religion is remarkable. But even in Greek Mysteries the
conceptions are necessarily not so purely spiritual as in the Christian
creed, of which they seem half-conscious and fragmentary anticipations.
Or we may regard them as suggestions, which Christianity selected,
accepted, and purified.

HYMN TO DEMETER

THE ALLEGED EGYPTIAN ORIGINS

In what has been said as to the Greek Mysteries, I have regarded them as
of native origin. I have exhibited rites of analogous kinds in the germ,
as it were, among savage and barbaric communities. In Peru, under the
Incas, we actually find Mama and Cora (Demeter and Kore) as Goddesses of
the maize (Acosta), and for rites of sympathetic magic connected with the
production of fertile harvests (as in the Thesmophoria at Athens) it is
enough to refer to the vast collection in Mr. Frazer's "Golden Bough." I
have also indicated the closest of all known parallels to the Eleusinian
in a medicine-dance and legend of the Pawnees. For other savage
Mysteries in which a moral element occurs, I have quoted Australian and
African examples. Thence I have inferred that the early Greeks might,
and probably did, evolve their multiform mystic rites out of germs of
such things inherited from their own prehistoric ancestors. No process,
on the other hand, of borrowing from Greece can conceivably account for
the Pawnee and Peruvian rites, so closely analogous to those of Hellas.
Therefore I see no reason why, if Egypt, for instance, presents parallels
to the Eleusinia, we should suppose that the prehistoric Greeks borrowed
the Eleusinia from Egypt. These things can grow up, autochthonous and
underived, out of the soil of human nature anywhere, granting certain
s