‘If thou hast tasted food below, thou canst not tarry here, Below the hollow earth must dwell the third part of the year.’ Porphyry[381] in his treatise on _Abstinence from Animal Food_, notes the reason and the rigour of the Eleusinian taboos. Demeter, he says, is a goddess of the lower world and they consecrate the cock to her. The word he uses, ἀφιέρωσαν, really means put under a _taboo_. We are apt to associate the cock with daylight and his early morning crowing, but the Greeks for some reason regarded the bird as chthonic. It is a cock, Socrates remembers, that he owes to Asklepios, and Asklepios, it will be seen when we come to the subject of hero-worship, was but a half-deified hero. The cock was laid under a taboo, reserved, and then came to be considered as a sacrifice. Porphyry goes on ‘It is because of this that the mystics abstain from barndoor fowls. And at Eleusis public proclamation is made that men must abstain from barndoor fowls, from fish and from beans, and from the pomegranate and from apples, and to touch these defiles as much as to touch a woman in child-birth or a dead body.’ The Eleusinian Mysteries were in their enactments the very counterpart of the Haloa. THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. The Eleusinian Mysteries[382] are usually treated as if they were a thing by themselves, a ceremony so significant, so august, as to stand apart from the rest of Greek Ritual. If my view be correct, they are primarily but the Eleusinian _Haloa_: all their ultimate splendour and spiritual as well as social prestige are due to two things, first the fact that Athens for political purposes made them her own, second that at some date we cannot exactly fix, they became affiliated to the mysteries of Dionysos. To Athens the mysteries owe their external magnificence, to Dionysos and Orpheus their deep inward content. The external magnificence, being non-religious, does not concern us; the deep inward content, the hope of immortality and the like are matters of cardinal import, but must stand over till a later chapter, after the incoming of Dionysos has been discussed. For the present what concerns us is, setting aside all vague statements and opinions as to the meaning and spiritual influence attributed by various authors, ancient and modern, to the mysteries, to examine the actual ritual facts of which evidence remains. Mysteries were by no means confined to the religion of Demeter and Kore. There were mysteries of Hermes, of Iasion, of Ino, of Archemoros, of Agraulos, of Hecate. In general mysteries seem to occur more usually in relation to the cult of women divinities[383], of heroines and earth-goddesses; from the worship of the Olympians in Homer they are markedly absent. In general, by a mystery is meant _a rite in which certain sacra are exhibited, which cannot be safely seen by the worshipper till he has undergone certain purifications_.