Crossword-Solution: ELEUSINIA 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 9

Aristophanes in 'The Frogs' makes one of the characters hint that some of the others 'smell of roast pig.' These people undoubtedly had been at the festival (known as the Thesmophoria) and had eaten freely of roast pig, Those who took part in another Greek mystery or festival (known as the Eleusinia) abstained from certain food, and above all from beans.

That a Totemistic dance, or medicine-dance of Emu hunting, is also displayed(3) at certain Mysteries of a given tribe, and that Baiame is spoken of as the hero of this ballet, no more deprives the Australian moral and religious teaching (at the Mysteries) of sacred value, than the stupid indecency whereby Baubo made Demeter laugh destroys the sacredness of the Eleusinia, on which Pindar, Sophocles and Cicero eloquently dwell.

The mysteries of Demeter, as will appear when her legend is criticised, contained one element all unlike these "mad doings"; and the evidence of Sophocles, Pindar, Plutarch and others demonstrate that religious consolations were somehow conveyed in the Eleusinia.

This is the case in Australia, and in Central Africa, where to be "uninitiated" is equivalent to being selfish.(1) Thus it seems not improbable that consolatory doctrines were expounded in the Eleusinia, and that this kind of sermon or exhortation was no less a survival from savagery than the daubing with clay, and the (Greek text omitted), and other wild rites.

The most celebrated of these, the great festival of Eleusinia, sacred to Ce'res and Pros'erpine, was observed every fourth year in different parts of Greece, but more particularly by the people of Athens every fifth year, at Eleu'sis, in Attica.