Confession was followed by a kind of baptism.[603] The candidates for initiation bathed in the pure waters of the sea. The manner of bathing and the number of immersions varied with the degree of guilt which they had confessed. They came from the bath new men. It was a κάθαρσις, a λουτρὸν, a laver of regeneration. They had to practise certain forms of abstinence: they had to fast; and when they ate they had to abstain from certain kinds of food.[604] (ii.) The purification was followed by a sacrifice—which was known as σωτήρια—a sacrifice of salvation: and in addition to the great public sacrifice, each of the candidates for initiation sacrificed a pig for himself.[605] Then there was an interval of two days before the more solemn sacrifices and shows began. They began with a great procession—each of those who were to be initiated carrying a long lighted torch, and singing loud pæans in honour of the god.[606] It set out from Athens at sunrise and reached Eleusis at night. The next day there was another great sacrifice. Then followed three days and nights in which the initiated shared the mourning of Demeter for her daughter, and broke their fast only by drinking the mystic κυκεὼν—a drink of flour and water and pounded mint, and by eating the sacred cakes.[607] (iii.) And at night there were the mystic plays: the scenic representation, the drama in symbol and for sight. Their torches were extinguished: they stood outside the temple in the silence and the darkness. The doors opened—there was a blaze of light—and before them was acted the drama of Demeter and Koré—the loss of the daughter, the wanderings of the mother, the birth of the child. It was a symbol of the earth passing through its yearly periods. It was the poetry of Nature. It was the drama which is acted every year, of summer and winter and spring. Winter by winter the fruits and flowers and grain die down into the darkness, and spring after spring they come forth again to new life. Winter after winter the sorrowing earth is seeking for her lost child; the hopes of men look forward to the new blossoming of spring. It was a drama also of human life. It was the poetry of the hope of a world to come. Death gave place to life. It was a _purgatio animæ_, by which the soul might be fit for the presence of God. Those who had been baptized and initiated were lifted into a new life. Death had no terrors for them. The blaze of light after darkness, the symbolic scenery of the life of the gods, were a foreshadowing of the life to come.[608] There is a passage in Plutarch which so clearly shows this, that I will quote it.[609]