itans when they attacked Dionysus daubed
themselves over with chalk, but afterwards, for ritual purposes, clay
was used". It may be urged with some force that the mother of Aeschines
introduced foreign, novel and possibly savage rites. But Sophocles, in
a fragment of his lost play, the Captives, uses the term in the same
ritual sense--

(Greek text omitted).

(1) De Corona, 313.

The idea clearly was that by cleansing away the filth plastered over
the body was symbolised the pure and free condition of the initiate. He
might now cry in the mystic chant--

(Greek text omitted).
Worse have I fled, better have I found.

That this was the significance of the daubing with clay in Greek
mysteries and the subsequent cleansing seems quite certain. We are led
straight to this conclusion by similar rites, in which the purpose of
mystically cleansing was openly put forward. Thus Plutarch, in his
essay on superstition, represents the guilty man who would be purified
actually rolling in clay, confessing his misdeeds, and then sitting at
home purified by the cleansing process ((Greek text omitted)).(1) In
another rite, the cleansing of blood-guiltiness, a similar process
was practised. Orestes, after killing his mother, complains that the
Eumenides do not cease to persecute him, though he has been "purified
by blood of swine".(2) Apollonius says that the red hand of the murderer
was dipped in the blood of swine and then washed.(3) Athenaeus describes
a similar unpleasant ceremony.(4) The blood of whelps was apparently
used also, men being first daubed with it and then washed clean.(5) The
word (Greek text omitted) is again the appropriate ritual term. Such
rites Plutarch calls (Greek text omitted), "filthy purifications".(6) If
daubing with dirt is known to have been a feature of Greek mysteries,
it meets us everywhere among savages. In O-Kee-Pa, that curiously minute
account of the Mandan mysteries, Catlin writes that a portion of the
frame of the initiate was "covered with clay, which the operator took
from a wooden bowl, and with his hand plastered unsparingly over". The
fifty young men waiting for initiation "were naked and entirely covered
with clay of various colours".(7) The custom is mentioned by Captain
John Smith in Virginia. Mr. Winwood Reade found it in Africa, where, as
among the Mandans and Spartans, cruel torture and flogging accompanied
the initiation of young men.(8) In Australia the evid