It is possible therefore that the festival took its name from natural holes in the ground in the district of the Limnae where it was celebrated, a district to this day riddled with Turkish cisterns made of great earthen jars (πίθοι). Such holes may have been used for graves, and were in many parts of Greece regarded as the constant haunt of ghosts going up and down. They were perhaps the prototypes of the ‘chasms in the earth’ seen in the vision of Er[75]. Near akin were the megara or chasms of Demeter at Potniae[76], and the clefts on and about the Pnyx where the women celebrated the Thesmophoria (p. 125). Such chasms would be the natural sanctuaries of a Ge and ghost cult. It is obvious that the two forms χύτροι and χύτραι would easily pass over into each other, and it is hard to say which came first. It is also to be noted that, though the masculine form more often means natural hole, it is also used for artificial pot. Pollux[77], in discussing ‘the vessels used by cooks,’ says that when Delphilos speaks of the big pot (χύτρον μέγαν) at the cook’s, he clearly means the χύτρα, not the foot-pan (χυτρόποδα). Though the form χύτροι ultimately established itself, the associations of χύτρα, artificial pot, seem to have prevailed, and these associations are important and must be noted. Hesychius[78] says that by φαρμακή is meant the χύτρα which they prepared for those who cleansed the cities. From the scholiast on the _Choephoroi_ of Aeschylus[79] we learn that the Athenians purified their houses with a censer made of a pot; ‘this they threw away at the meeting of three ways and went away without turning back.’ Here we have of course the origin of ‘Hecate’s suppers.’ These were primarily not feasts for the goddess but purification ceremonies, of which, as no mortal might taste them, it was supposed an infernal goddess partook. The day of the Chytroi was a day of such purifications. From some such notion arose the Aristophanic word ἐγχυτρίζειν, ‘to pot,’ i.e. to utterly ruin and destroy, to make away with. The scholiast[80] explains it as referring to the practice of exposing children, but Suidas[81] knows of another meaning; he says the ἐγχυτρίστριαι were those ‘women who purified the unclean, pouring upon them the blood of the victim,’ and also those who ‘poured libations to the dead,’ those in a word who performed ceremonies of placation and purgation.