On this subject I will let
Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are we to make of the
gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to
omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions
of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many
rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about
the same time. Thus at the festival of the Thesmophoria in Athens
women sit on the ground and fast. And the Boeotians open the vaults
of the Sorrowful One, naming that festival sorrowful because Demeter
is sorrowing for the descent of the Maiden. The month is the month
of sowing about the setting of the Pleiades. The Egyptians call it
Athyr, the Athenians Pyanepsion, the Boeotians the month of Demeter.
. . . For it was that time of year when they saw some of the fruits
vanishing and failing from the trees, while they sowed others
grudgingly and with difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands
and huddling it up again, on the uncertain chance that what they
deposited in the ground would ever ripen and come to maturity.
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