The consideration of the _Haloa_ has been purposely reserved to the end for this reason. The rites of the Thesmophoria, Skirophoria and Arrephoria are carried on by women only, and when they come to be associated with divinities at all, they are regarded as ‘sacred to’ Demeter and Kore or to analogous women goddesses Ge, Aphrodite, Eileithyia and Athene. Moreover the _sacra_ carried are cereal cakes and nephalia: but the rites of the _Haloa_, though indeed mainly conducted by women, and sacred in part to Demeter, contain a new element, that of wine, and are therefore in mythological days regarded as ‘sacred to’ not only Demeter but Dionysos. On this point an important scholion[372] to Lucian is explicit. The Haloa is ‘a feast at Athens containing mysteries of Demeter and Kore and Dionysos on the occasion of the cutting of the vines and the tasting of the wine made from them.’ Eustathius[373] states the same fact. ‘There is celebrated, according to Pausanias, a feast of Demeter and Dionysos called the Haloa.’ He adds, in explaining the name, that at it they were wont to carry first-fruits from Athens to Eleusis and to sport upon the threshing-floors, and that at the feast there was a procession of Poseidon. At Eleusis, Poseidon was not yet specialized into a sea-god only; he was _Phytalmios_, god of plants, and as such, it will be later seen (p. 427), his worship was easily affiliated to that of Dionysos. The affiliation of the worship of the corn-goddess to that of the wine-god is of the first importance. The coming of Dionysos brought a new spiritual impulse to the religion of Greece, an impulse the nature of which will later be considered in full, and it was to this new impulse that the Eleusinian mysteries owed, apart from political considerations which do not concern us, their ultimate dominance. Of these mysteries the Haloa is, I think, the primitive prototype. As to the primitive gist of the Haloa, there is no shadow of doubt: the name speaks for itself. Harpocration[374] rightly explains the festival, ‘the Haloa gets its name, according to Philochorus, from the fact that people hold sports at the _threshing-floors_, and he says it is celebrated in the month Poseideon.’ The sports held were of course incidental to the business of threshing, but it was these sports that constituted the actual festival. To this day the great round threshing-floor that is found in most Greek villages is the scene of the harvest festival. Near it a booth (σκηνή) is to this day erected, and in it the performers rest and eat and drink in the intervals of their pantomimic dancing.