The remarks of the scholiast about the double λόγος, i.e. the double _rationale_ of the festival, are specially instructive. By his time, and indeed probably long before, educated people had ceased to believe that by burying a fertile animal or a fir-cone in the earth you could induce the earth to be fertile; they had advanced beyond the primitive logic of ‘sympathetic magic.’ But the Thesmophoria was still carried on by conservative womanhood: ‘They keep the Thesmophoria as they always used to do.’ An origin less crude and revolting to common sense is required and promptly supplied by mythology[311]. Kore had been carried down into a cleft by Plouton: therefore in her memory the women went down and came up. Pigs had been swallowed down at the same time: therefore they took pigs with them. Such a mythological _rationale_ was respectable if preposterous. The myth of the rape of Persephone of course really arose from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth. In the back of his mind the scholiast knows that the content of the ritual was ‘physical,’ the object the impulsion of nature. But even after he has given the true content his mind clouds over with modern associations. The festival, he says, is a ‘thank-offering’ to Demeter. But in the sympathetic magic of the Thesmophoria man attempts direct compulsion, he admits no mediator between himself and nature, and he thanks no god for what no god has done. A thank-offering is later even than a prayer, and prayer as yet is not. To mark the transition from rites of compulsion to rites of supplication and consequent thanksgiving is to read the whole religious history of primitive man. Some details of the rites of the Thesmophoria remain to be noted. The Thesmophoria, though, thanks to Aristophanes, we know them best at Athens, were widespread throughout Greece. The ceremony of the pigs went on at Potniae in Boeotia. The passage in which Pausanias[312] describes it is most unfortunately corrupt; but he adds one certain detail, that the pigs there used were new-born, sucking pigs (ὗς τῶν νεογνῶν). Among nations more savage than the Greeks a real Kore took the place of the Greek sucking pig or rather reinforced it. Among the Khonds, as Mr Andrew Lang[313] has pointed out, pigs and a woman are sacrificed that the land may be fertilized by their blood; the Pawnees of North America, down to the middle of the present century, sacrificed a girl obtained by preference from the alien tribe of the Sioux, but among the Greeks there is no evidence that the pigs were surrogates.