Just like the people didn’t sit in and girls did its rites when you look at the privacy, it is sometimes complicated to reconstruct exactly what continued within the Thesmophoria. An informed provider, Aristophanes’s Females of one’s Thesmophoria ( 411 bce ), pointedly imparts nothing facts about the genuine rituals. Instead they comically portrays the brand new attack off a masculine spy, Mnesilochus, disguised since the a female so you can guard his cousin, this new tragic poet Euripides, away from prosecution of the female to possess his bad portrayal of them. Putting together certain later source, the next photo emerges: Thinking with the event first started more 3 months in advance. Piglets was basically sacrificed inside midsummer, probably at the Skira, another ladies festival, throughout the hence nothing is well known, but probably associated with Athena. Their remains was indeed after that thrown when you look at the pits including type snakes and you can phalluses designed away from dough. Pigs were a traditional providing so you can Demeter due to their fecundity since the evidenced by the their highest litters also as the Greeks relevant these with women genitalia. Snakes was indeed with the Demeter and with chthonic cults way more basically. Brand new phalluses evoked male potency. Brand new data recovery of your decayed remains played a main character inside the fresh new Thesmophoria. A choose group of women called antletriai (Bailers) retrieved the blend will ultimately inside the event and you can placed they when you look at the boxes for the altars regarding Demeter and Persephone, given that a sort of fertilizer becoming mixed with seeds just before growing to be sure a good assemble.
Since this mixture of decayed flesh, 
money, and you will pig skeleton are noticed sacred, this new Bailers was required to to see a state away from intimate love three weeks prior to it believed the obligations
For the first day, Anodos (Going up), citizen girls built and you may hiked around brand new Thesmophorion shrine holding the executes wanted to would the rituals while the specifications to possess its stay. Its deviation need to have brought about an interruption, to possess into center day of new event none the law courts neither the fresh Set up came across. Female away from for each deme chosen a few archousai (rulers) in order to preside over the festival. On second date, Nesteia (Fasting), the women fasted, sitting on mats composed of unique flowers considered suppress intimate desire, symbolically commemorating Demeter’s refusal for eating away from sadness towards the loss of the lady daughter, because the depicted on misconception regarding their abduction. To the third time, Kalligeneia (Fair Beginning), the women feasted, taking part of one’s meats of your own sacrificial pigs, providing cakes in the shape of genitals, and you can food pomegranates. Just after remembering the fresh sorrows of a moms and dad who’d missing the woman just boy, the ladies well-known the fresh new present out of childbirth and children. The brand new fertility of earth during the seedtime is actually directly about the new influence regarding good people for the Athenian area.
When you are necessary having hitched resident ladies, virgins could not sit in as they hadn’t but really achieved intimate maturity
Although it is actually uncertain in the event the routine taken place, female engaged in the same effective banter out-of aischrologia skilled during the new Stenia, probably after the following go out, following fasting. In the context of brand new Thesmophoria, it jesting recalled new rough motion of one’s servant Iambe exactly who made brand new deity make fun of despite the lady sorrows from the Homeric Hymn so you can Demeter (Hom. Hymn Dem. 202–204). From the encouraging intimate term, that it routine kidding is thought to provide sex within marriage and ergo people fertility. Like other women-only festivals from inside the ancient Greece, the latest Thesmophoria built a female people where girls was indeed ritually and you will politically in charge, if perhaps temporarily. Brand new celebration highlighted that continuity of your own polis and its hobbies relied on women’s reproductive electricity.
