by Sam Woodward at Psyche: In 392 CE, the Roman emperor Theodosius I outlawed one of the oldest and most well-established mystery cults in the Greek-speaking world, the Eleusinian Mysteries, which had taken place for more than 1,000 years in a sanctuary on the outskirts of Athens. A devout Christian, Theodosius I’s decree was part of an effort to stamp out pagan beliefs and cultic mysticism. His empire would not be one with divination practices, blood sacrifices and secret mystic rites to Greek gods. And so, the Eleusinian cult dedicated to Demeter and Persephone, which had drawn countless people from across the ancient Greek-speaking world since 1500 BCE, ended abruptly. The rites are now long forgotten. But the Eleusinian Mysteries have endured in other ways.
Though we do not know exactly what took place at Eleusis, we do know a little about how the experience felt for initiates. This is how Plutarch, philosopher and priest of Apollo, described the experience of mystery initiation sometime during the 1st or 2nd century:
First there was wandering and tiresome running about alongside apprehensive and endless journeys through darkness. Then, before the final stage, there were all sorts of terrors: shivering, trembling, sweating, and terrible awe. After that a wondrous light confronted them, and purified landscapes and meadows received them, with voices and songs and rites of sacred harmonies and holy visions. In the midst of these the wholly fulfilled and initiated person has become liberated and free to roam about, celebrating the mysteries with a crown atop their head and communing with blessed and pure people. They look back at the impure and uninitiated multitude back on earth, who stampede and squabble with one another in dense mire and mist, clinging onto their sufferings because of their fear of death and lack of faith in the good things the next world holds.1
Participating in the rites was clearly transformative, which is perhaps why the Mysteries at Eleusis became so influential. Notable initiates include Aeschylus, Sophocles and Cicero, and the Roman emperors Hadrian, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. Philosophers were drawn to the experience, too. But for one Greek thinker in particular, the Eleusinian Mysteries were important for more than just spiritual transformation.
Plato seems to have understood the ritual experiences at Eleusis as a kind of blueprint for acquiring higher knowledge, and he used this blueprint in his Allegory of the Cave to show how people use education and reasoning, not their senses, to find philosophical truth. This may be surprising. Plato is known as a rational thinker and, on the surface, his allegory has nothing to do with the ritual practices of a mystery cult. However, reading more carefully, his story of philosophical truth begins to echo the initiate’s transformative experience. And Eleusinian ideas and experiences appear elsewhere in his work. The question is why a keen proponent of logos (reason) was so interested in the secret rites at Eleusis. Why did Plato turn to mysticism to explain his ideas about knowledge?
In the ancient Greek-speaking world, mystery cults for gods and heroes abounded. Though they were widespread, we know little about them today. Many enforced a policy of total secrecy, and each was geographically localised, with no standardised practices or doctrines linking them. The term ‘mystery cult’ only confuses things further. We call them ‘mystery’ cults not because they remain obscure to us but because that is how the Greeks referred to them: ‘musteria’meaning ‘secret rites’. The modern word ‘mystery’ has lost this ritual meaning. The modern word ‘cult’ is also misleading. The Eleusinian Mysteries were not fringe spiritual practices. The ‘cult’ permeated religious life, remaining open to (almost) all people in the Greek-speaking world, including men, women, children, foreigners, even slaves – anyone could participate if they spoke Greek and had not committed murder or other serious crimes.
This is how Cicero explained the influence of the Mysteries around 58 BCE. He implies that some radical reformulation of worldview is acquired through Eleusinian initiation. But what sort of ritual transforms a person’s viewpoint, their fate in the afterlife, and their society? What exactly happened at Eleusis?
The mysteries were broken into two stages. The first stage of initiation, the ‘Lesser Mysteries’, took place annually in February or March. Then an initiate was ready for the ‘Greater Mysteries’ at Eleusis, the final stage of initiation in September or October the following year, during the Athenian festival of Demeter and Persephone. Before the final stage, initiates purified themselves by fasting and bathing, observing a period of celibacy, and carrying a sacrificial piglet from Athens to the sea. A ritual procession of hundreds of initiates then made a journey of some 23 kilometres along the Sacred Way from Athens to the sanctuary at Eleusis where the final revelation – called the epopteia or epoptika (literally, ‘the beholding’), took place in a great hall called the Telesterion.
Awakenings also appear in the dialogues of Plato. In his Socratic dialogue the Symposium (written around 385-370 BCE), the final stage of the philosopher’s ascent – philosophical truth – is analogous to the intense revelation at the climax of a mystery ritual. In the Symposium, Plato directly references the Eleusinian Mysteries through a dialogue between Socrates and a seer named Diotima. While explaining her philosophy of love, Diotima uses the words ‘telea’ (referring to the Eleusinian rites) and ‘epoptika’ (the ultimate revelation or ‘beholding’ at the final stage of initiation)when she questions whether Socrates could become initiated into the highest mysteries of love and sex:
Perhaps even you, Socrates, could become an initiate in these mysteries of love. But when it comes to the ultimate rites [telea] and highest stage of initiation [epoptika] – these being the end goal if someone progresses correctly – I do not know whether you would be able to do this.3
The rites in the two stages seem to have differed. Writing around the 2nd century CE, Clement of Alexandria, a theologian who converted to Christianity from paganism, explains that the Lesser Mysteries comprised ‘teaching and preparation for things to come’ whereas in the Telesterion ‘there is nothing left to learn, but rather one is to behold and meditate upon nature and realities’.
The climax of the Mysteries likely entailed beholding a deity and ritually enacting her presence, culminating with the epiphanic appearance of Demeter herself. To do this, the rites may have involved re-enacting a sacred drama depicting Persephone’s abduction and Demeter’s epiphany (the myth on which the original ritual was based). A transition from darkness to light, from blindness to seeing, seems to have been central to the ceremony. Some researchers have suggested that sacred images were shown among a plethora of torches and dancing lights. Others suggest that ritualised psychedelics were used to intensify the experience. Whatever the case, the experience was life-changing: a spiritual awakening.
More here.
