Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

OTHER FESTIVALS

Demeter, says “it is considered impious to impart to the general public the rites performed yearly by night in honour of Dionysus”. In another passage he tells us that at the festival of the Scieria in Arcadia women were scourged—the female counterpart of the scourging of Spartan boys and young men (Pausanias, li, 37, 6 ; vili, 23, 1).

As at the Thesmophoria, so also at the festival of Demeter Mysia, not far from Pellene in Peloponnesus, the entry of men was forbidden ; indeed, not even a male dog was allowed (Pausanias, Vii, 27, 10). The festival lasted seven days; in the night after the third day was the principal celebration, and on the day following both sexes indulged in much coarse banter and grossness.

That the male sex was excluded from the festivals of Demeter, at least for a time, is frequently attested : e.g., for the festival of Agila in Laconia (Pausanias, iv, 17, 1), for the mysteries of Demeter in the island of Cos (Paton-Hicks, Inscriptions of Cos, No. 386), and many others, which we need not mention, since nothing essentially new could be said about them.

Aphrodite also, the great dispenser of love, was originally a goddess of vegetation and fruitfulness ; in Greece she was hardly honoured anywhere so much as in the island of Cyprus.

We know of a festal gathering, which was held every year at Paphos in Cyprus, to which men and women from the whole island flocked together ; both sexes went in company to Palaipaphos which was no great distance away, where all kinds of erotic mysteries took place, of which we chiefly hear from the Fathers of the Church (Clem. Alex., Protrepticon, p. 13; Arnobius, Adversus Gentes, 5,19; Firmicus Maternus, Err. Prof. Rel., 10), who certainly in their Christian wrath snarl rather than give us an intelligent and connected account of them. The initiated were handed salt and a phallus, after which they presented a coin as a return gift

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