It may further be noted here that this idea of the punishment of the unmarried completely explains the custom, on which I have already touched, of erecting a water-pitcher ([Greek: loutrophoros]) over the grave of unmarried persons. This intimated, according to Eustathius[1], that the person there buried had never taken the bath which both bride and bridegroom were wont to take before marriage. But this must not be taken to mean that the water-pitcher was erected as a symbol of the punishment which the dead person was supposed to be undergoing; this was not an idea which his relatives and friends, even if they had held it, would have wished to blazon abroad. One might as soon expect to find depicted on a modern tombstone the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched. No; the water-pitcher was not a symbol, it was an instrument; for my part I have little faith in the existence of any symbols in popular religion which are not in origin at least instruments; and the purpose to which this instrument was put was to supply the dead person with that wedding-bath which he had not taken in life, and without which he would vainly strive in the under-world to prepare himself for divine wedlock. The water-pitcher was not commemorative, but preventive, of future punishment. Its erection was not a warning to the living, but a service to the dead.
Thus then the evidence for the intimate association of the mysteries, or of the main idea which runs through them, with human weddings is complete and, I hope, convincing; and the custom of the water-pitcher, which concludes it, fitly introduces at the same time the evidence for the association of the same idea with funerals. This is equally plentiful. The vague conception of death as a wedding, which as I have shown was elaborated in the mysteries, has of course already been exemplified in all those passages of ancient literature and modern folk-songs which I have adduced, and I have found in it also the motive for the assimilation of funeral-customs to the customs of marriage. But the evidence that the actual doctrines of the mysteries, in which more definite expression was given to that vague idea, were closely associated with death and funeral-custom is to be found rather in epitaphs and sepulchral monuments.
- ↑ Eustath. ad Hom. Il. XXIII. 141.
