marvellous light: pure places and meadows, dances, songs, and holy
apparitions." Plutarch might be summarising the Fijian belief. Again,
take the mystic golden scroll, found in a Greek grave at Petilia. It
describes in hexameters the Path of the Shade: the spring and the white
cypress on the left: "Do not approach it. Go to the other stream from
the Lake of Memory; tell the Guardians that you are the child of Earth
and of the starry sky, but that yours is a heavenly lineage; and they
will give you to drink of that water, and you shall reign with the other
heroes."

Tree, and spring, and peaceful place with dance, song, and divine
apparitions, all are Fijian, all are Greek, yet nothing is borrowed by
Fiji from Greece. Many other Greek inscriptions cited by M. Foucart
attest similar beliefs. Very probably such precepts as those of the
Petilia scroll were among the secret instructions of Eleusis. But they
are not so much Egyptian as human. Chibiabos is assuredly not borrowed
from Osiris, nor the Fijian faith from the "Book of the Dead." "Sacred
things," not to be shown to man, still less to woman, date from the
"medicine bag" of the Red Indian, the mystic tribal bundles of the
Pawnees, and the _churinga_, and bark "native portmanteaux," of which Mr.
Carnegie brought several from the Australian desert.

[Demeter and Persephone sending Triptolemos on his mission. Marble
relief found at Eleusis--now in Athens: lang92.jpg]

For all Greek Mysteries a satisfactory savage analogy can be found. These
spring straight from human nature: from the desire to place customs, and
duties, and taboos under divine protection; from the need of
strengthening them, and the influence of the elders, by mystic sanctions;
from the need of fortifying and trying the young by probations of