DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9184#0422
Chap. XIII.] Eletisis and the Mysteries.
399
Preller has summed up the performance as consist-
ing of the following elements:—hymns, sacred dances,
mimical scenes, and sudden apparitions, with solemn
utterances and precepts to accompany them. It is likely
that besides the human actors, there were puppets, some
perhaps of considerable size and fitted to impress the
awakened nerves ' of the auditors. Deities appeared
ascending from the earth or descending from heaven ;
and uttering words of a mysterious kind, to which the
mystae or their instructors might attach a deeper or
a simpler meaning according to their taste and fancy.
The dull would be impressed by the nobility of the
pageant; the excitable might fancy that the deities
themselves were present in bodily form; and the spiri-
tually inclined might have their sense of the supernatural
quickened, and read in sight and sound the promise
of a better world beyond the grave. For this sub-
jectivity and variety of impression certainly belonged in
a marked degree to the mysteries. Full and perfect
knowledge was said to belong to the hierophant alone;
the priests understood much, but some things were
beyond their comprehension, while the multitude fol-
lowed the scenes with vague and uncertain surmises.
The testimony of vase-pictures in regard to the mys-
teries has often been cited. It must, however, be used
with extreme caution. The Greeks would never have
allowed vases to be painted with subjects taken from
the sacred dramas of Eleusis, even if it had been the
custom in Greece to transfer to painting scenes as they
were enacted on the stage. But, as we know, this was
not the custom ; painting and acting have very different
sets of laws ; the treatment of the same subject develops
in quite a different way in the drama from that in which
it develops in art; and in particular the architectonic
laws governing vase-painting are so strict as to prevent
399
Preller has summed up the performance as consist-
ing of the following elements:—hymns, sacred dances,
mimical scenes, and sudden apparitions, with solemn
utterances and precepts to accompany them. It is likely
that besides the human actors, there were puppets, some
perhaps of considerable size and fitted to impress the
awakened nerves ' of the auditors. Deities appeared
ascending from the earth or descending from heaven ;
and uttering words of a mysterious kind, to which the
mystae or their instructors might attach a deeper or
a simpler meaning according to their taste and fancy.
The dull would be impressed by the nobility of the
pageant; the excitable might fancy that the deities
themselves were present in bodily form; and the spiri-
tually inclined might have their sense of the supernatural
quickened, and read in sight and sound the promise
of a better world beyond the grave. For this sub-
jectivity and variety of impression certainly belonged in
a marked degree to the mysteries. Full and perfect
knowledge was said to belong to the hierophant alone;
the priests understood much, but some things were
beyond their comprehension, while the multitude fol-
lowed the scenes with vague and uncertain surmises.
The testimony of vase-pictures in regard to the mys-
teries has often been cited. It must, however, be used
with extreme caution. The Greeks would never have
allowed vases to be painted with subjects taken from
the sacred dramas of Eleusis, even if it had been the
custom in Greece to transfer to painting scenes as they
were enacted on the stage. But, as we know, this was
not the custom ; painting and acting have very different
sets of laws ; the treatment of the same subject develops
in quite a different way in the drama from that in which
it develops in art; and in particular the architectonic
laws governing vase-painting are so strict as to prevent