One day more, and the Eleusinia themselves are completed.  As in the beginning by lustration and sacrifices we conciliated the favor of the gods, so now by libation we finally commend ourselves to their care.  Thus did the Greeks begin all things with lustration and end with libation, each day, each feast,—­all their solemn treaties, their ceremonies, and sacred festivals.  But, like all else Eleusinian, this libation must be sui generis, emptied from two bowls,—­the one toward the East, the other toward the West.  Thus is finished this Epos, or, as Clemens Alexandrinus calls it, the “mystical drama” of the Eleusinia.

Now, reader, you have seen the Mysteries.  And what do they mean?  Let us take care lest we deceive ourselves, as many before us have done, by merely looking at the Eleusinia.

Oh, this everlasting staring!  This it is that leads us astray.  That old stargazer, with whom Aesop has made us acquainted, deserved, indeed, to fall into the well, no less for his profanity than his stupidity.  Yet this same star-gazing it is that we miscall reflection.  Thus, in our blank wonder at Nature, in our naked analysis of her life, expressed through long lists of genera and species and mathematical calculations, as if we were calling off the roll of creation, or as if her depth of meaning rested in her vast orbs and incalculable velocities,—­in all this we fail of her real mystery.

To mere external seeming, the Eleusinia point to Demeter for their interpretation.  To her are they consecrated,—­of her grief are they commemorative; out of reverence to her do the mystae purify themselves by lustration and by the sacrifice that may not be tasted; she it is who is symbolized, in the procession of the basket, as our Great Mother, through the salt, wool, and sesame, which point to her bountiful gifts,—­while by the poppies and pomegranates it is hinted that she nourishes in her heart some profound sorrow:  by the former, that she seeks to bury this sorrow in eternal oblivion,—­by the latter, that it must be eternally reiterated.  The procession of the torches defines the sorrow; and by this wild, despairing search in the darkness do we know that her daughter Proserpine, plucking flowers in the fields of light, has been snatched by ruthless Pluto to the realm of the Invisible.  Then by the procession of Iacchus we learn that divine aid has come to the despairing Demeter; by the coming of, Aesculapius shall all her wounds be healed; and the change in the evening from the mystae to epoptae is because that now to Demeter, the cycle of her grief being accomplished, the ways of Jove are made plain,—­even his permission of violence from unseen hands; to her also is the final libation.