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Thus Eleusis and, in a lesser degree, the many places where S. Demetrius has succeeded to the chief functions of Demeter have hardly yet lost touch with the ancient worship of the goddess, Christianised in form though it may be. But Arcadia too, where alone of all the Peloponnese the indigenous population were secure from the Achaean and Dorian immigrations and maintained in seclusion the holiest of Pelasgian cults, preserves to the present day in story and in custom some vestiges of the old religion; and here they are less tinged with Christian colour.

Near the city of Pheneos, which according to Pausanias[149] was the scene of mysteries similar to those enacted at Eleusis, there are some underground channels by which the waters of Lake Pheneos are carried off, soon to reappear as the river Ladon. These channels were believed by Pausanias himself to be artificial—the work of Heracles, it was said, who also constructed a canal close by, traces of which are still visible: but according to another authority[150] they were the passage by which Pluto carried off Persephone to the infernal regions. Some memory of the latter belief seems still to linger among the people of Phoniá (the modern form of Pheneós), who call these subterranean vents ἡ τρούπαις τοῦ διαβόλου, ‘the holes of the devil,’ and who further believe that it is through them that the spirits of the dead pass to the lower world. My guide informed me also that the rise or fall of the waters of the lake—the level varies to an extraordinary degree—furnishes an augury as to what rate of mortality may be expected in the village. If the water is high, the lower world is for the time being congested and requires no more inhabitants; if it sinks, the lower world is empty, and thirsts for fresh victims. The connexion of such beliefs with the cult of Persephone, though vague, is probably real; but how general they may be among the present villagers I cannot say; Dodwell[151] apparently heard nothing of them except the name of ‘the devil’s holes,’ and the explanation of this name which was given to him took the form of a story about a conflict between the devil and a king of Phoniá, in which the former hurled explosive balls of grease at his adversary, one of which set him on fire and drove his body right through the base of the mountain which rises from the lake’s edge, leaving thereafter an escape for the waters. There is certainly nothing in common between this story, which Leake also heard in a slightly different version[152], and the beliefs communicated to me; and I suspect that it is a comparatively modern aetiological fable designed perhaps to satisfy the curiosity of children concerning the name. The belief that the subterranean channel is a descent to the lower world is more clearly a vestige of the old local cult of Kore.