3. The custom of plastering the initiated over with clay or filth was common in Greek as in barbaric mysteries. Greek examples may be given first. Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of helping his mother in certain mystic rites, aiding her, especially, by bedaubing the initiate with clay and bran. Harpocration explains the term used () thus: "Daubing the clay and bran on the initiate, to explain which they say that the Titans when they attacked Dionysus daubed themselves over with chalk, but afterwards, for ritual purposes, clay was used". It may be urged with some force that the mother of Aeschines introduced foreign, novel and possibly savage rites. But Sophocles, in a fragment of his lost play, the Captives, uses the term in the same ritual sense--.
De Corona, 313.
The idea clearly was that by cleansing away the filth plastered over the body was symbolised the pure and free condition of the initiate. He might now cry in the mystic chant--.
Worse have I fled, better have I found.
That this was the significance of the daubing with clay in Greek mysteries and the subsequent cleansing seems quite certain. We are led straight to this conclusion by similar rites, in which the purpose of mystically cleansing was openly put forward. Thus Plutarch, in his essay on superstition, represents the guilty man who would be purified actually rolling in clay, confessing his misdeeds, and then sitting at home purified by the cleansing process (). In another rite, the cleansing of blood-guiltiness, a similar process was practised. Orestes, after killing his mother, complains that the Eumenides do not cease to persecute him, though he has been "purified by blood of swine". Apollonius says that the red hand of the murderer was dipped in the blood of swine and then washed. Athenaeus describes a similar unpleasant ceremony. The blood of whelps was apparently used also, men being first daubed with it and then washed clean. The word is again the appropriate ritual term. Such rites Plutarch calls , "filthy purifications". If daubing with dirt is known to have been a feature of Greek mysteries, it meets us everywhere among savages. In O-Kee-Pa, that curiously minute account of the Mandan mysteries, Catlin writes that a portion of the frame of the initiate was "covered with clay, which the operator took from a wooden bowl, and with his hand plastered unsparingly over". The fifty young men waiting for initiation "were naked and entirely covered with clay of various colours". The custom is mentioned by Captain John Smith in Virginia. Mr. Winwood Reade found it in Africa, where, as among the Mandans and Spartans, cruel torture and flogging accompanied the initiation of young men. In Australia the evidence for daubing the initiate is very abundant. In New Mexico, the Zunis stole Mr. Cushing's black paint, as considering it even better than clay for religious daubing.
So Hermann, op. cit., 133.
Eumenides, 273.
Argonautica, iv. 693.
ix. 78. Hermann, from whom the latter passages are borrowed, also quotes the evidence of a vase published by Feuerbach, Lehrbuch, p. 131, with other authorities.
Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 68.
De Superstitione, chap. xii.
O-Kee-Pa, London, 1867, p. 21.
Savage Africa, case of Mongilomba; Pausanias, iii. 15.
Brough Smyth, i. 60.
Custma and Myth, p. 40.
4. Another savage rite, the use of serpents in Greek mysteries, is attested by Clemens Alexandrinus and by Demosthenes (loc. cit.).