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 _mystæ_ to _epoptæ_ 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.

But the story of the stolen Proserpina is itself an afterthought, a
fable invented to explain the Mysteries; and, however much it may have
modified them in detail, certainly could not have been their ground. Nor
is the sorrowing Demeter herself adequate to the solution. For the
Eleusinia are older than Eleusis,--older than Demeter, even the Demeter
of Thrace,--certainly as old as Isis, who was to Egypt what Demeter was
to Greece,--the Great Mother[2] of a thousand names, who also had _her_
endlessly repeated sorrow for the loss of Osiris, and in honor of whom
the Egyptians held an annual festival. Thus we only remove the mystery
back to the very verge of myth itself; and we must either give up the
solution or take a different course. But perhaps Isis will reveal
herself, and at the same time unveil the Mysteries. Let us read her
tablet: "I am all that, has been, all that is, all that is to be; and
the veil which is over my face no mortal hand hath ever raised!" Now,
reader, would it not be strange, if, in solving _her_ mystery, we should
also solve the Sphinx's riddle? But so it is. This is the Sphinx in her
eldest shape,--this Isis of a thousand names; and the answer to her