Eleusinian Mysteries

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eleusinian Mysteries were initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone at the Panhellenic Sanctuary of Eleusis in ancient Greece. For roughly two millennia, tens of thousands of people made the pilgrimage to this coastal town northwest of Athens, passed through secret rites, and left changed. They were forbidden, on pain of death, from telling anyone what they had witnessed. The ban held. Aeschylus, Plato, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero: all were initiated. None broke the silence. So what actually happened inside the great hall at Eleusis? What did initiates drink from that sacred cup? And how did a ceremony rooted in a Bronze Age harvest cult come to shape the philosophy of the ancient world and echo through art and literature all the way to the present day?

• 2. The Myth at the Center

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  Demeter was the goddess of agriculture and fertility, and her story, as recounted in one of the Homeric Hymns dated to around 650 BC, begins with an abduction. Her daughter Persephone, also called Kore or "maiden," had been assigned to paint all the flowers of the earth. Before she could finish, Hades, the god of the underworld, seized her. Demeter searched everywhere for her daughter; during her long, grief-stricken wandering, she stopped at Eleusis and taught the secrets of agriculture to a hero of that place named Triptolemus. Then, to force the gods' hand, she caused a drought so devastating that it killed many people and cut off the gods from sacrifice and worship. Zeus relented, and Persephone was sent back via the messenger Hermes. But Hades had tricked her first, offering her pomegranate seeds, either six or four depending on the telling. Because she had eaten food in the underworld, she was bound by the rule of the Fates to return there for a matching number of months each year. During those months, Demeter's grief stalled all growing things. When Persephone ascended again, the earth flowered. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, at line 415, captures the moment of her return: "This was the day, at the very beginning of bountiful springtime." That seasonal cycle, descent and ascent, loss and reunion, was the very engine of the Mysteries.

• 3. Roots Older Than Greece

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  Excavations beneath the great hall at Eleusis, the Telesterion, revealed that a private building stood on that site as far back as the Mycenaean period, before the Greek Dark Ages. It appears that the cult of Demeter was originally a private household religion. Some scholars have argued that the Eleusinian cult descended from a still-older Minoan tradition, and that Demeter may have begun as a poppy goddess who brought the poppy from Crete to Eleusis. A key piece of comparative evidence comes from Lycosura, where the megaron of Despoina, the precursor goddess of Persephone, closely resembles the Telesterion itself. The name of the town, Eleusis, is pre-Greek and carries possible links to the goddess Eileithyia, whose name Elysia appears in the regions of Laconia and Messene. A painted image from the old palace of Phaistos supports the long visual tradition: it shows an armless and legless deity growing out of the ground, her head turning into a large flower, a striking early image of Persephone's ascent. Under Peisistratos of Athens, the Mysteries became pan-Hellenic and pilgrims flooded in from across the Greek world and beyond.

• 4. Who Could Enter

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  Around 300 BC, the state of Athens took control of the Mysteries, which had previously been managed by two hereditary families, the Eumolpidae and the Kerykes. That transfer brought a dramatic expansion in the number of initiates. The requirements for entry were deliberately broad: a person had to be free from blood guilt, meaning they must never have committed murder, and they had to speak Greek. Men, women, and even slaves were permitted. Participation fell into four tiers. At the base were first-time initiates. Those who had already attended at least once became eligible for the highest level, called epopteia, meaning contemplation, which granted access to the deepest secrets of Demeter. The priesthood officiating at the rites was divided into six offices. The male high priest, the Hierophant, held an office inherited within the Phileidae or Eumolpidae families. Uniquely, the Hierophant and the High Priestess held equal rank. It fell to the High Priestess to impersonate the goddesses Demeter and Persephone during the reenactment of the myth. Events at Eleusis were actually dated by the name of the reigning High Priestess, making her the civic calendar itself. A separate group of priestesses called the Panageis, or melissae ("bees"), lived entirely secluded from men.

• 5. Ten Days in Boedromion

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  The Lesser Mysteries were held in the month of Anthesterion, the eighth month of the Attic calendar, falling in mid-winter around February or March. Participants sacrificed a piglet to Demeter and Persephone and purified themselves in the river Ilisos. Only after that could they attend the Greater Mysteries, which took place in Boedromion, the third month, in late summer around September or October, and lasted ten days. On the 14th of Boedromion, the sacred objects were carried from Eleusis to the Eleusinion, a temple at the base of the Acropolis in Athens. On the 15th, called the Gathering, priests declared the start of the rites. On the 16th, initiates washed themselves in the sea at Phaleron. The 17th was given over to the Epidauria, a festival honoring Asklepios and his daughter Hygieia, celebrated with a procession to the Eleusinion and an all-night feast. On the 18th, the great procession departed from Kerameikos, the Athenian cemetery, along the Sacred Way. Participants swung branches called bacchoi and at a particular spot shouted obscenities in honor of Iambe, or Baubo, the old woman whose dirty jokes had once coaxed a smile from the grieving Demeter. They also called out "Iakch', O Iakche!", possibly invoking Dionysus or a separate deity, Iacchus. After arriving at Eleusis, they kept an all-night vigil before, on the 19th of Boedromion, entering the Telesterion itself.

• 6. Inside the Telesterion

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  Before crossing the threshold, each initiate recited a formulaic admission: "I have fasted, I have drunk the kykeon, I have taken from the kiste and after working it have put it back in the calathus." The kiste was a sacred chest and the calathus a lidded basket; only the initiates knew what they contained, and that knowledge went to the grave with every one of them. The kykeon was a drink made from barley and pennyroyal. Once inside the Telesterion, the rites were organized around three elements: dromena, things done, a dramatic reenactment of the Demeter and Persephone myth; deiknumena, things shown, a display of sacred objects in which the Hierophant played an essential role; and legomena, things said, commentaries accompanying the display. Together, these were called the aporrheta, the unrepeatables. Divulging them carried a death sentence. The tragic playwright Aeschylus, who lived from around 525 to 455 BC, was reportedly put on trial for allegedly revealing Mysteries secrets in his plays, though he was acquitted. The comic poet Diagoras was condemned to death, in part for the same crime. The high point of the ceremony was, according to the Church Father Hippolytus of Rome, "an ear of grain in silence reaped." That single image, grain cut in silence, carried the entire meaning: the buried seed, the death, the inevitable return. After the climax, an all-night feast with dancing was open to the general public in the Rarian Field, said to be the first spot on earth where grain ever grew.

• 7. The Kykeon and Entheogenic Theories

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  The question of what was in the kykeon has occupied scholars for generations. Numerous researchers have proposed that its power came from a psychedelic ingredient, making it what scholars call an entheogen, a substance that produces a divine inner experience. The ergot fungus Claviceps paspali, a parasite that grows on certain grasses, contains alkaloids including ergotamine, a precursor to LSD, and ergonovine, which researchers Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin describe as capable of producing LSD-like effects. Physical evidence for ergot use came from excavations at the Mas Castellar site in Girona, Spain, at a temple dedicated to the two Eleusinian Goddesses. Ergot fragments were found inside a vase, and within the dental calculus of a 25-year-old man buried there, suggesting the substance was actually consumed. Other candidates proposed over the years include psychoactive mushrooms such as Psilocybe varieties, Amanita muscaria, and even DMT derived from Mediterranean plants such as Phalaris or Acacia, which would need to be combined with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor like Syrian rue. An opioid from the poppy has also been proposed, given that opium was certainly produced in Crete and the Demeter cult may have brought the poppy from there to Eleusis. A contrasting hypothesis, put forward by J. Nigro Sansonese in 1994, holds that the Mysteries produced altered states not through chemistry but through breath control and proprioception similar to yogic samyama. Sansonese even suggests the kiste, the sacred chest opened by the Hierophant, was an esoteric reference to the initiate's own skull, within which a sacred light appeared after trance practice. The consensus among classicists has remained skeptical of the psychedelic explanation, but the debate has not closed.

• 8. End and Afterlife

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  In 170 AD, the Temple of Demeter was sacked by the Sarmatians. It was rebuilt by Marcus Aurelius, who in recognition was allowed to become the only lay person ever to enter the anaktoron, the innermost sanctuary within the Telesterion. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries, the prestige of Eleusis faded. The emperor Julian, who reigned from 361 to 363 after about fifty years of Christian rule, tried to revive the Eleusinian Mysteries and was the last emperor to be initiated. The historian Eunapius, himself initiated by the last legitimate Hierophant, recorded that the Mysteries were formally closed in 392 AD by the emperor Theodosius I. Eunapius describes the last Hierophant as a usurper, "the man from Thespiae who held the rank of Father in the mysteries of Mithras." In 396, the Goth king Alaric I looted what remained of the shrines during his raiding campaign in Attica. Yet the tradition did not vanish cleanly. Historian Hans Kloft has noted that local peasants and shepherds in the Greek countryside partially transferred Demeter's rites onto Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki, who became the local patron of agriculture in her place. In art, Carl Gustav Jung, who lived from 1875 to 1961, drew on the qualities of the Kore from the Eleusinian Mysteries as metaphors for his reworking of psychoanalytic treatment into a ritual of initiation and rebirth. Octavio Vazquez's symphonic poem Eleusis, commissioned by the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores and the RTVE Symphony Orchestra, was premiered in 2015 by conductor Adrian Leaper at the Teatro Monumental in Madrid, drawing the ancient rites into concert halls more than sixteen centuries after Theodosius closed the sanctuary gates.