Thesmophoria was a festival held in Greek cities in honour of the twin goddesses Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The name derives from thesmoi, or laws by which men must work the land. The Thesmophoria were the most widespread festivals and the main expression of the cult of Demeter, aside from the Eleusinian Mysteries. The Thesmophoria commemorated the third of the year when Demeter abstained from her role of goddess of the harvest and growth; spending the harsh summer months of Greece, when vegetation dies and lacks rain, in mourning for her daughter who was in the realm of the Underworld. Their distinctive feature was the sacrifice of pigs.^[1] This article is about the grain goddess Demeter. ... Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1874) (Tate Gallery, London In Greek mythology, Persephone (Greek Περσεφόνη, Persephónē) was the Queen of the Underworld of epic literature. ... The Eleusinian Mysteries (Greek: Ἐλευσίνια Μυστήρια) were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece. ... For other uses, see Underworld (disambiguation). ...

This feast was for women to celebrate their private customs, their chance to leave the home and set up makeshift shelters somewhat apart from the centers of the deme.^[2] Only women who were the spouses of Athenian citizens could attend the festival; no unmarried women were present,^[3] and no men, who were expected to send their wives and to meet the festival's costs, but who might be severely treated if they attempted to spy on the proceedings. The ceremony was supposed to promote fertility, but the women prepared for it with sexual abstinence. Bathing was also used for purification. In biology, a deme (rhymes with team) is another word for a local population of organisms of one species that actively interbreed with one another and share a distinct gene pool. ...

The word is applied as an epithet to Demeter in this context: Demeter Thesmophoros; a relief at Eleusis illustrated in Kerenyi (fig 7) shows the goddess sitting on the ground as she receives her votaries. "In this situation she can be called Demeter Thesmophoros, for the Athenian women imitated her when they sat on the ground and fasted at the Thesmophoria"^[4] Eleusis (Game) The cardgame invented by Robert Abbott in 1962, and later popularized in 1977 by Martin Gardner in his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American magazine. ...

At Athens and some other places the festival was of three days, from the 11th to the 13th of Pyanopsion.^[5] The first day at Athens was the anodos, the "way up" to the sacred space, the Thesmophorion near the hill of the Pnyx. The second day was a grieving day of fasting (nesteia) without garlands, seated on the ground, without fire in some cities, in which pomegranate seeds only were eaten; those that fell on the ground were the food of the dead and might not be picked up.^[6] The third day, especially the evening and night that began the Greek day, was a meat feast in celebration of the Kalligeneia, a "goddess of beautiful birth" who appears in no other contexcts and has no counterpart among the Olympian gods, further emphasizing the archaic, pre-Olympian nature of this festival that reinforced female solidarity. The absence of elements of the Thesmophoria in myths is notable: the pigs of the swineherd Euboulos, that were swallowed up in the cleft in the ground when Hades abducted the Kore, are an attempt to provide an etiology for the ancient rites; in some places, Zeus penetrates the Thesmophoria, as Zeus Eubouleus (Burkert p 243). The speakers platform at the Pnyx, with the Acropolis in the background. ... Binomial name L. For the color see: Pomegranate (color) The Pomegranate (Punica granatum) is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub or small tree growing to 5–8 m tall. ... The Twelve Olympians, in Greek mythology, were the principal gods of the Greek pantheon, residing atop Mount Olympus. ... In Greek mythology, Euboulos (good counsellor) was the father of Carme, who mothered Britomartis by Zeus. ... Hades, Greek god of the underworld, enthroned, with his bird-headed staff, on a red-figure Apulian vase made in the 4th century BC. For other uses, see Hades (disambiguation). ... KORE is an AM radio station in Springfield, Oregon, USA, serving the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area with Christian music and programming. ... This article is about the medical term. ...

Not much else is known about the Thesmophoria, as only women were allowed to attend, and it was rare that women wrote down anything at this time, short of letters. The "mysteries" or initiation rites (teletai) surrounding restrictive religious ceremonies were jealously guarded by those who performed them. The chief source is a scholiast on Lucian (Dialogue Meretricii 2.1), explaining the term "Thesmophoria". Scholium (plural scholia) is the name given to grammatical, critical and explanatory notes or brief commentary whether original or extracted from existing commentaries, which are inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author as a succinct gloss. ... Lucian. ...

The ceremony involved sinking sacrifices into the earth by night and retrieving the decaying remains of pigs that had been placed in the megara of Demeter, trenches and pits or natural clefts in rock, the previous year. As snakes were known to congregate in such pits, the scholiast on Lucian explains, those who didn't go to retrieve the remains shouted to scare away any that might be lurking down there. After prayers the foetid remains of the pigs from the previous year were mixed with seeds and planted (Scholiast on Lucian): ""the clearest example in Greek religion of agrarian magic," Burkert observes (1985 p 244). Megara (Greek: Μέγαρα (Big Houses); see also List of traditional Greek place names) is an ancient city in Attica, Greece. ... For other uses, see Serpent (disambiguation). ...

The playwright and poet Aristophanes parodied this festival in the play, Thesmophoriazusae, but he was unable to give much detail about the festival itself. Sketch of Aristophanes Aristophanes (Greek: , ca. ... Thesmophoriazusae (Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria) is a comedy written by the Greek playwright Aristophanes. ...

Notes

1. ^ "Pig bones, votive pigs, and terracottas, which show a votary or the goddess herself holding the piglet in her arms, are the archaeological signs of Demeter sanctuaries everywhere." (Burkert p 242).
2. ^ Another archaic festival celebrated under temporary shelter is the Hebrew Succoth.
3. ^ The position of slave women is unclear, according to Burkert.
4. ^ Kerenyi, note 141, p. 212 , instancing Plutarch De Iside et Osiride 378.
5. ^ Diodorus Siculus (v.4.7) reports that the Thesmophoria at Syracuse lasted ten days. At Thebes or Delos the festival occurred two months earlier, so any seed-sowing connection was not intrinsic.
6. ^ Clement of Alexandria (Protrepicus ii.19.3) parses this as because the pomegranate grew from spilt drops of Adonis' blood, a useful reminder that his interpretations of pagan cult were often (intentionally?) wide of the mark. Kerenyi, (1967 p 138) calls it a "strange interpretation".

Sukkot (סוכות or סֻכּוֹת sukkōt, booths) or Succoth is an 8-day Biblical pilgrimage festival, also known as the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Tabernacles, or Tabernacles. ... Mestrius Plutarchus (Greek: Πλούταρχος; 46 - 127), better known in English as Plutarch, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist. ... Diodorus Siculus (c. ... Syracuse (Italian, Siracusa, ancient Syracusa - see also List of traditional Greek place names) is a city on the eastern coast of Sicily and the capital of the province of Syracuse, Italy. ... For the ancient capital of Upper Egypt, see Thebes, Egypt. ... The island of Delos, Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann, 1847 The island of Delos (Greek: Δήλος, Dhilos), isolated in the centre of the roughly circular ring of islands called the Cyclades, near Mykonos, had a position as a holy sanctuary for a millennium before Olympian Greek mythology made it the birthplace of... Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius Clemens), was the first member of the Church of Alexandria to be more than a name, and one of its most distinguished teachers. ... In Greek mythology Adonis (Greek: , also: Άδωνις) is an archetypal life-death-rebirth deity of Semitic origin, and a central cult figure in various mystery religions. ...

References

• Harrison, Jane Ellen, 1903. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
• Burkert, Walter, 1985. Greek Religion, V.2.5 pp 242-46. "Thesmophoria"
• Kerenyi, Karl, 1967. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter.