It is impossible for us to realize the full importance of these sacred rites. Founded originally on the universal sense of helplessness in man, his dependence on the mysterious powers of Nature which, unmoved by him, yield him his sustenance in life, and on his belief in a Divine sustaining power when the strength of life is failing him—and thus based upon his dependence on food in life and on God in death, the Eleusinian mysteries grew out of the poetic mysticism of the earliest religious reverence. The corn seed buried in the earth is represented by Persephone, who, while gathering flowers in a vale, ‘herself of gloomy Dis was gathered.’ Carried by him beneath the earth, she became wife of the King of Hades, and queen of the region of the dead. But Demeter, her mother, in frantic grief, after wandering through the world, came to Eleusis, and dwelt there, while the earth, in sympathy with her, withheld its fruits. The race of man was about to perish for want of food, when Zeus, in pity of its helpless misery, allowed Persephone to return to the earth and spend six months of every year with her fond mother;—a legend symbolic of the happy springing up of the new corn and of the joyful harvest. Thus, the religious instinct of man to pay worship and devotion to the giver of his earthly sustenance became mingled with the devotion, no less natural to him, by which he sought to be sustained and strengthened after death by the powerful goddess of the regions of the dead. Much of the religion of the Athenian Greeks centred round this myth, and the later additions to it. The greater mysteries, which only the initiated knew, or could assist in celebrating, took the place with them of the religious exercises and devotions and dogmas of a later age. On the first day the initiated gathered together at Eleusis. On the second they made long symbolical ablutions, as if to free themselves from every taint of sin. On the third day they offered sacrifices, as some small return to the divine mother and her child, who gives to helpless men the necessary fruits of earth, and a recognition of their dependence upon her bounty. On the fourth and fifth days other rites were celebrated, which were not to be divulged; and on the sixth, the greatest day of all, the citizens set out from Athens to accompany the wondrous little statue of Iakchos, a son of Demeter, in pompous march from Athens to Eleusis. This was an addition to the earlier, simpler mysteries, and had been imported from the East, or perhaps from Krete. Iakchos was really the infant Bakchos, representing the generative power of nature, as well as the stimulating force of wine, and was an introduction of a later time, when men were not content with the purer celebration of the innocent harvest of the corn-fields, with the bread and honey of their fathers, but must have wine from the grape-juice too.