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RITE OR METAPHOR? started to be applied to the sacraments as well." This period, then, which is called the great patristic age," seems the most relevant for the purposes of our study. The research was based on alemmatized search performed in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) online. It included both authors who lived at the turn of the 3" and 4" centuries and authors who lived at the turn of the 5" and 6" centuries.* The research ignored cognates of the word dpyta (e.g. dpyidcew, ävopyiaotog etc.); only the term itself was taken into account. ETYMOLOGY AND MEANING Ihe etymology of öpyıa is uncertain. Today it is usually considered to be derived from the root Fepy-, like the verb Épöw “to do” and the noun Epyov “work, deed.”® Thus, its original meaning was perhaps “things done,” and, in a religious context, “rite, service.” The word is first used in extant Greek literature in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in which it refers to the mysteries celebrated in Eleusis." The dpyta, revealed by Demeter to the chosen ones, are characterized in the poem as “the rites that are not to be transgressed, nor pried into, nor divulged.”" The word, however, was employed for other religious rites as well. In archaic and classical Greece, the term was used mainly in connection with the cult of Dionysus, but also with that of Meter Magna, Kabiri, and Hecate.” Later, in Hellenistic times, the cult of “oriental” deities such as Adonis, Baal, Isis, Osiris, and Mithras could be called dpyta, as well.” Since the paradigmatic Eleusinian 6py1a involved secrecy and the dpyta of the ecstatic deities such as Dionysus and Meter Magna also involved ritual Arthur D. Nock, Hellenistic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments, Mnemosyne 5 (1952), 210-212; John D.B. Hamilton, The Church and the Language of Mystery. The First Four Centuries, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanieses 53 (1977), 489-492; Louis Bouyer, The Christian Mystery. From Pagan Myth to Christian Mysticism, trans. I. Trethowan, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark 1989, 160-162; Jan Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World, Berlin-Boston, Walter de Gruyter 2014, open access http://www.degruyter. com/viewbooktoc/product/ 185838, 161-164, accessed 22 September 2015. 7 E.g. Bouyer, The Christian Mystery, 169. The occurrence of dpyta in the De siccitate (PG 61.723) was ignored in the present paper, as the work turned out to be an 11" century text and is no longer attributed to John Chrysostom, see Susan R. Holman, The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia, New York, Oxford University Press 2001, 84, 86, 88. Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, vol. 1-2, Leiden, Brill 2010, s.v. &pyov and öpyıa. 10 H.Hom.Cer. 273, 476. H.Hom.Cer. 478-479 tat’ oönwg Eotı napel&i]uev oülte] nvHEodaı / oöT’ áxéerv. Trans. Helene P. Foley. 12 Motte — Pirenne-Delforge, Le mot et les rites, 128, 130-131. 8 Motte — Pirenne-Delforge, Le mot et les rites, 128, 138. + 67 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 67 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:13
