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This chapter addresses what Gilbert intended to represent through the action of his poem. An evidently symbolic young girl, Elmira, is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Her mother is drowned. Gilbert makes several references to the Eleusinian Mysteries which concern the rebirth of Ceres’ daughter Proserpina. The common mother-daughter theme suggests a parallel interplay between the living and the dead. The ancient mystery cults, and their parallels with the secret rituals associated with Masonic initiation, were of contemporary interest, as can be shown by Thomas Taylor’s Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, which was based on an exegesis of Aeneas’ descent into the underworld (Aeneid, Book VI). This method of exegesis – which had been used by Neoplatonists to unlock hidden meanings in Homer – provides a possible key to Gilbert’s allegory.

Among the many places of worship that could be found in the territory of the city of Athens and its chôra during the classical period, several offer remarkable configurations of nature: the sanctuary of Aphrodite of the Gardens on the slope of the Acropolis with its flowery meadow, the green field in Eleusis for the celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries in honour of Demeter and Persephone, the olive tree sacred to Athena near the Erechtheion, groves and running water at Brauron where young Athenian girls played the bear in honour of Artemis, etc. Often actualised in the tragedies of Euripides, the aetiological legends that constitute the foundations of these cults help to associate the relevant divinity with a hero or heroine. This combination is the starting point of a discussion of the identities of the gods in a polytheist system and their modifications through the association of a heroic partner.

“The ‘Plantheon’ of Greek Mythology” examines how—before the emergence of competing scientific paradigms—agricultural paradigms were subsumed into myth and integrated into religious worldviews that associated plants and agricultural abundance with women and goddesses. Hesiod’s Theogony provides valuable insights into Greek ideas about gender that influenced how plants were understood. Philosophers initiated a transition from myth-based to logic-based belief systems, but their proto-scientific views must be viewed against the backdrop of Greek mythology and religion. Women played important roles in religious festivals and rituals, the most enduring of which, the Eleusinian Mysteries, lasted until the end of the Roman Empire. The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Thesmophoria took as their basic text the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” which recounts the story of Demeter, goddess of grain and the harvest, and her daughter Kore/Persephone. Myths concerning Aphrodite, Artemis, Chloris, Cybele, Adonis, Daphne, Dionysus and others, including the goddess Hermaphrodite, are discussed.

Chapter 6 turns to cult as yet another of the situational contexts of divine epiphany. The three sections on mystic epiphanies, epiphany festivals, and epiphany in a sacrificial context aim at examining divine epiphany and mortal–immortal interaction in general as they are portrayed in narratives that focus on these three key areas of cultic activity. In the first section we learn that mystic epiphanies share some common semeia with other contexts, but they have a distinct epistemological aspect: they are tools of gradual introduction into mysteric knowledge. The second section looks at epiphanic festivals, that is festivals which celebrate the arrival or the departure, the appearance or the disappearance, of a deity in a cultic context. Finally, the third section examines sacrifice and the subsequent sacrificial feast as common situational contexts for divine epiphany.

In early 303 BC Demetrius Poliorcetes consolidated his hold over the Peloponnese, and then made the unusual request that the Athenians allow him accelerated initiation into the religious cult known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. This was made possible by an extraordinary alteration of the Attic calendar, and in nine days he passed through the three stages of a ritual which normally took nineteen months. By 302, after a great deal of diplomatic activity, he called a congress of all Greek city states and formed a Hellenic League aimed at deposing Cassander from the Macedonian kingship, but he was recalled to Asia by his father Antigonus to participate in the Ipsus campaign.