The Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated for nearly two thousand years at Eleusis near Athens, were the most revered of all Greek religious rites. Their founding myth — preserved in the great Homeric Hymn to Demeter — told how Demeter, goddess of the grain, wandered the earth in grief when her daughter Persephone was carried off to the underworld by Hades. In her sorrow she came to Eleusis, and there, when her daughter was restored to her for part of each year, she founded the rites that re-enacted that drama of loss and return — and through it promised the initiated a happier lot beyond death.

The Lesser and Greater Mysteries

Initiation came in stages. The Lesser Mysteries, held in spring at Agrae outside Athens, prepared and purified the candidate; the Greater Mysteries then unfolded over nine days each autumn. The crowd of initiates — the mystai — fasted, then walked the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis in a great torchlit procession, breaking the fast at last with the kykeon, a drink of barley and mint. Within the windowless hall of initiation, the telesterion, the rite turned on three things: the things done, the things shown, and the things said. At its climax the hierophant revealed the sacred objects in a sudden blaze of light.

The secret and the promise

What was shown and spoken in that inner hall was guarded by an oath of total secrecy which the initiates kept astonishingly well; we know only that those who had seen the rites spoke of them with awe. The ancient writers agreed on the effect, if not the content: the initiate came away with sweeter hopes about death and the life to come, released from the dread that shadowed the uninitiated. The path led through purification, a long night of searching in darkness, and a final revelation in blazing light — the return of Persephone made an image of the soul’s own passage through death.

The philosophers’ mystery

Plato drew again and again on the language of these rites to describe the philosophical ascent. In the Phaedrus and the Symposium the soul’s purification and its final vision of Beauty itself are spoken of as the highest initiation — the epopteia, the full beholding — into which philosophy alone fully leads. Recollection of the Forms, the turning of the soul toward intellect and the Good: all of it borrowed the grammar of Eleusis. For the later Platonists the rites were a sacred image, enacted in ritual, of the very ascent the philosopher pursued by thought.

Eleusinian and Bacchic kinship

Eleusis did not stand alone. Beside it ran the Orphic and Bacchic mysteries of Dionysus, with their own myths of a god who dies and returns and their own teaching about the fate of the soul across its cycle of births. The English Platonist Thomas Taylor, the first to render so much of this tradition into English, read the two together as a single sacred science — ritual figures, he argued, of the soul’s descent into the body and its eventual return to the divine.