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‘Her father, she told me only two days ago, had profaned this truth in us by trafficking in this same plant. I feared what she would have said or thought or done if she had noticed my cactus, my “inner eye”, from the Egyptian temples in this garden. Today, she has gone to some initiation ceremony, to make an end, she told me, of the traffic in golden images which make a mock of true religion.’
‘I am afraid,’ Hermippē went on, ‘of these new “mysteries”... ’, and her low voice trembled.
I was astonished. I had known Hermippē as so strong and rational a young woman. Afterwards, I knew that she had always broken with the conventions which kept most women in many of our cities apart, in the women’s quarters. And yet, unlike Aspasia, and other famous courtesans, she also stayed within the main conventions — she became a wife, a mother, mistress of the house, and she practised the conventional pieties as a normal matter of form. And with her sharp mind always cutting through confused thought, how could she be perturbed by these ‘mystery religions’?
‘You know where the real “mysteries” are ... ’ I began.
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