The chaste heaven loves to violate the earth, and love lays hold on earth to join in wedlock. The rain from the streaming heaven falls down and impregnates the earth; and she brings forth her mortals the pasturage of sheep and Demeter’s sustenance; and the ripe season for the trees is perfected by the watery union. Of all this I am the cause. (The Deipnosophists. XIII, 600b)
Aeschylus, too, besides inventing that comeliness and dignity of dress which Hierophants and Dadouchoi emulate, when they put on their vestments. (Athenaeus 21e)
For the highest and dearest of the gods are come to our city. Hither, indeed, the time has brought together Demeter and Demetrius. She comes to celebrate the solemn mysteries of the Daughter.
(Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists VI, 253d)
Plemochoe is an earthen dish shaped like a top, but tolerably firm on its base;
some call it a kotyliskos, according to Pamphilus. They use it at Eleusis on the
last day of the Mysteries, a day which they call from it Plemochoai; on that day
they fill two plemochoai, and they invert them (standing up And facing the east
in the one case, the west in the other), reciting a mystical formula over them.
(Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists XI, 496a)
At the great assembly of the Eleusinia and at the festival of Poseidon, in full sight of the whole Greek world, she removed only her cloak And let down herlong hair before stepping into the water. (Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists XIII, 591a)
Nor did the son of Mene, Musaeus, master of the Graces, cause Antiope to go without her meed of honor. And she, beside Eleusis’s strand, expounded to the initiates the loud, sacred voice of mystic oracles, as she duly escorted the priest through the Rarian plain to honor Demeter. And she is known even in Hades. (Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, 597d)
According to Himerios, a sophist who lived in Athens when Julian was Emperor of Rome (361-363): an old law ordered the initiates to take with them handfuls of agricultural produce which were the badges of a civilized life. Now Semus of Delos in his work On Paeans says: “The handfuls of barley, taken separately, they called amalai; but when these are gathered together And many are made into a single bundle people called them ouloi or iouloi; hence also they called Demeter sometimes Chloe, sometimes Ioulo. Hence from Demeter’s gifts they call not only the fruit, but also the hymns sung in honor of the goddess, ouloi or iouloi. There are also Demetrouloi and kalliouloi ; and the refrain: ‘Send forth a sheaf, a plenteous sheaf, a sheaf send forth.'”
(Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists. XIV, 618d)
Heracleides of Syracuse in his work On Institutions says that in Syracuse, on the Day of Consummation at the Thesmophoria, cakes of sesame and honey were molded in the shape of the female pudenda, and called throughout the whole of Sicily mylloi and carried about in honor of the goddesses. (Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists XIV, 646f)
Aeschylus, too, besides inventing that comeliness and dignity of dress which Hierophants and Dadouchoi emulate, when they put on their vestments. (Athenaeus 21e)
(We hear of a strange festival held at Eleusis known as the pelting with stones. Athenaios again makes Ulpian, one of his characters state:) “I know, indeed of a festival held in my own Eleusis which is called Pelting. But I will not say a word about it unless I get a reward from every one of you.” (George E. Mylonas. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 140)
