e carrying by women of certain magic charms, fir-cones and
snakes and unnameable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there
is a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth,
and their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the
fields. There is more magic ritual, more carrying of sacred objects, a
fast followed by a rejoicing, a disappearance of life below the earth,
and a rising again of life above it; but it is hard to find definite
traces of any personal goddess. The Olympian Demeter and Persephone
dwindle away as we look closer, and we are left with the shadow
Thesmophoros, '_She who carries Thesmoi_',[16:1] not a substantive
personal goddess, but merely a personification of the ritual itself: an
imaginary Charm-bearer generated by so much charm-bearing, just as
Meilichios in the Diasia was generated from the ritual of appeasement.

Now the Diasia were dominated by a sacred snake. Is there any similar
divine animal in the Thesmophoria? Alas, yes. Both here, and still more
markedly in the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, we
regularly find the most lovely of all goddesses, Demeter and Persephone,
habitually--I will not say represented by, but dangerously associated
with, a sacred Sow. A Pig is the one animal in Greek religion that
actually had sacrifice made to it.[16:2]

* * * * *

The third feast, the Anthesteria, belongs in classical times to the
Olympian Dionysus, and is said to be the oldest of his feasts. On the
surface there is a touch of the wine-god, and he is given due official
prominence; but as soon as we penetrate anywhere near the heart of the
festival, Dionysus and his brother gods are quite forgotten, and all
that remains is a great ritual for appeasing the dead. All the days of
the Feast were _nefasti_, of ill omen; the first day especially was +es
to pan apophras+. On it the Wine Jars which were also Seed and Funeral
Jars were opened and the spirits of the Dead let loose in the
world.[17:1] Nameless and innumerable, the ghosts are summoned out of
their tombs, and are duly feasted, each man summoning his own ghosts to
his own house, and carefully abstaining from any act that would affect
his neighbours. And then, when they are properly appeased and made
gentle, they are swept back again out of this world to the place where
they properly belong, and the streets and houses cleaned from the
presence of death.