Note 29 — Chapter VI · THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES

Preller, for example (stimulated by K. O. Müller), is fond of dwelling on the special character and meaning of the worship of the chthonic deities as something quite distinct from other Greek worships of the gods. An example may be found in Pauly-Wissowa1, s.v. Eleusis, iii, p. 108: “The department of religion to which the Eleusinian cult belongs is that of the chthonic deities, which had been indigenous in Greece from the earliest times and was a widely popular cultus. In this cultus ideas of the generous fruitfulness of the earth’s soil and of the fruitfulness of death—whose seat seems to be beneath the earth like the Old Testament Sheol—were interwoven in a mysteriously suggestive way: a way which essentially resisted all efforts at clear and distinct comprehension, and could not help leading to mystical or occult suggestions and obscure symbolistic expression.” This and further amplifications in the same sense all rest upon the unprovable axiom that the activities of the χθόνιοι as gods of the soil and as gods of the kingdom of the souls were “interwoven”: the suggestive haze of the rest follows naturally. But what in all this is Greek?