hough it sounds, was by the
Athenians counted unlucky, because on that day they believed "the ghosts
of the dead rose up." The sanctuaries were roped in, each householder
anointed his door with pitch, that the ghost who tried to enter might
catch and stick there. Further, to make assurance doubly sure, from
early dawn he chewed a bit of buckthorn, a plant of strong purgative
powers, so that, if a ghost should by evil chance go down his throat, it
should at least be promptly expelled.

For two, perhaps three, days of constant anxiety and ceaseless
precautions the ghosts fluttered about Athens. Men's hearts were full of
nameless dread, and, as we shall see, hope. At the close of the third
day the ghosts, or, as the Greeks called them, _Keres_, were bidden to
go. Some one, we do not know whom, it may be each father of a household,
pronounced the words: "Out of the door, ye Keres; it is no longer
Anthesteria," and, obedient, the Keres were gone.

But before they went there was a supper for these souls. All the
citizens cooked a _panspermia_ or "Pot-of-all-Seeds," but of this
Pot-of-all-Seeds no citizen tasted. It was made over to the spirits of
the under-world and Hermes their daimon, Hermes "Psychopompos,"
Conductor, Leader of the dead.

* * * * *

We have seen how a forest people, dependent on fruit trees and berries
for their food, will carry a maypole and imagine a tree-spirit. But a
people of agriculturists will feel and do and think quite otherwise;
they will look, not to the forest but to the earth for their returning
life and food; they will sow seeds and wait for their sprouting, as in
the gardens of Adonis. Adonis seems to have passed through the two
stages of Tree-Spirit and Seed-Spirit; his effigy was sometimes a tree
cut down, sometimes his planted "Gardens." Now seeds are many,
innumerable, and they are planted in the earth, and a people who bury
their dead know, or rather feel, that the earth is dead man's land. So,
when they prepare a pot of seeds on their All Souls' Day, it is not
really or merely as a "supper for the souls," though it may be that
kindly notion enters. The ghosts have other work to do than to eat their
supper and go. They take that supper "of all seeds," that _panspermia_,
with them down to the world below, that they may tend it and foster it
and bring it back in autumn as a pot of _all fruits_, a _pankarpia_.

"Thou fool, that which thou sowest is n