A passage in which Plutarch speaks of the women fasting is of great importance for the understanding of the general gist of the festival. In the discourse on Isis and Osiris[323] he is struck by the general analogy of certain agricultural ceremonies in Egypt and Greece, and makes the following instructive remarks: ‘How are we to deal with sacrifices of a gloomy, joyless and melancholy character if it be not well either to omit traditional ceremonies, or to upset our views about the gods or confuse them by preposterous conjectures? And among the Greeks also many analogous things take place about the same time of the year as that in which the Egyptians perform their sacred ceremonies, e.g. at Athens _the women fast at the Thesmophoria seated on the ground_, and the Boeotians stir up the _megara_ of _Achaia_, calling that festival grievous (ἐπαχθῆ), inasmuch as Demeter was in grief (ἐν ἄχει), on account of the descent of her daughter. And that month about the rising of the Pleiades is the month of sowing which the Egyptians call Athor, and the Athenians Pyanepsion (bean month), and the Boeotians Damatrion. And Theopompos relates that those who dwell towards the West account and call the Winter Kronos, and the Summer Aphrodite, and the Spring Persephone, and from Kronos and Aphrodite all things take their birth. And the Phrygians think that in the Winter the god is asleep, and that in the Summer he is awake, and they celebrate to him revels which in winter are Goings-to-sleep and in summer Wakings-up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in winter the god _is bound down_ and imprisoned, and in spring aroused and set free again.’ Whatever be the meaning of the difficult _Achaia_[324] Plutarch has hit upon the truth. Common to all the peoples bordering on the Aegean and, had he known it, to many another primitive race, were ceremonies of which the gist was pantomime, the mimicking of nature’s processes, in a word the ritual of sympathetic magic. The women fasted seated on the ground because the earth was desolate; they rose and revelled, they stirred the _megara_ to mimic the impulse of spring. Then when they knew no longer why they did these things they made a goddess their protagonist. Plutarch[325] has made for himself in his own image his ‘ideal’ Greek gods, serene, cheerful, beneficent; but he is a close observer of facts, and he sees there are ceremonies—‘sacrifices’ (θυσίαι) in his late fashion he calls them—which are ‘mournful,’ ‘gloomy,’ ‘smileless.’ Who and what are these gods who demand fasting and lamentation? He must either blink the facts of acknowledged authorized ritual—this he cannot and will not do, for he is an honest man—or he must confuse and confound his conceptions of godhead. Caught on the horns of this dilemma he betakes himself to comparative anthropology and notes analogies among adjacent and more primitive peoples.