Eleusis

Certain · the excavated sanctuary

Fourteen miles from Athens along the Sacred Way, the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore celebrated for a millennium the Mysteries founded, the Homeric Hymn says, by the grieving goddess herself. Initiates were sworn to silence and kept it; what remains is the testimony of the change — “thrice happy they who have seen these rites before descending to Hades.” Plato’s language of initiation, beholding, and the blessed sight in the Phaedrus and Symposium is Eleusinian through and through.