The preliminary fast before the eating of sacred things is common to most primitive peoples; it is the simplest negative form of purification: among the more logical savages it is often accompanied by the taking of a powerful emetic. The _kykeon_ requires a word of explanation. The first-fruits at Eleusis were presented in the form of a _pelanos_[403]. The nature of a _pelanos_ has already been discussed, and the fact noted that the word _pelanos_ was used only of the half-fluid mixture offered to the gods. Its equivalent for mortals was called _alphita_ or sometimes _kykeon_. Eustathius in commenting on the drink prepared by Hekamede for Nestor, a drink made of barley and cheese and pale honey and onion and Pramnian wine, says that the word _kykeon_ meant something between meat and drink, but inclining to be like a sort of soup that you could sup. Such a drink it was that in the Homeric Hymn Metaneira prepared for Demeter, only with no wine, for Demeter, as an underworld goddess ‘might not drink red wine’: and such a wineless drink, made in all probability from the _pelanos_ and only differing from it in name, was set before the mystae. Some ceremony like the drinking of the _kykeon_ is represented in the vase-painting[404] in fig. 15. Two worshippers, a man and a woman, are seated side by side; before them a table piled with food, beneath it a basket of loaves. They are inscribed _Mystae_ (Μυστα). A priest holding in the left hand twigs and standing by a little shrine, offers to them a cylix containing some form of drink. The presence of the little shrine has made some commentators see in the priest an itinerant quack priest (ἀγύρτης), but it is quite possible that shrines of this kind containing sacra were carried at the Eleusinian mysteries. Anyhow the scene depicted is analogous. [Illustration: FIG. 15.] Of the actual _sacra_ which the initiated had to take from the chest, place in the basket, and replace in the chest, we know nothing. The _sacra_ of the Thesmophoria are known, those of the Dionysiac mysteries were of trivial character, a ball, a mirror, a cone, and the like: there is no reason to suppose that the _sacra_ of the Eleusinian mysteries were of any greater intrinsic significance. Clement[405] in a passage preceding that already quoted gives the Eleusinian ‘tokens,’ with slightly different wording and with two additional clauses: he says ‘the symbols of this initiation are, I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the _kernos_, I passed beneath the _pastos_.’ The scholiast[406] on Plato’s _Gorgias_ makes a similar statement. He says ‘at the lesser mysteries many disgraceful things were done, and these words were said by those who were being initiated: I ate from the timbrel, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the _kernos_’; he further adds by way of explanation ‘the _kernos_ is the _liknon_ or _ptuon_,’ i.e. it is some form of winnowing fan.