Ancient Greece's most famous secret rite kept its secret for two thousand years
For roughly two millennia, initiates walked to Eleusis to relive the story of Persephone's abduction and return, and almost none of them ever revealed what happened inside. The climax, sources hint, was an ear of grain cut in silence. Some scholars think psychedelic drugs explain the rite's extraordinary hold.
The Mysteries honoured Demeter, goddess of farming and fertility, and her daughter Persephone at the sanctuary of Eleusis near Athens. Their foundation text is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, dated to about 650 BC. In it Persephone, also called Kore, the maiden, is snatched by Hades. Her grieving mother wanders the earth, teaching agriculture to the Eleusinian hero Triptolemus along the way, and finally withholds the harvest until famine forces Zeus to relent. But Persephone has eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld, six or four depending on the telling, so she must return there for part of every year, and the earth lies barren while she is gone.
The rite was staged as a cycle of descent, search and ascent, moving initiates from grief to joy. Priests poured out two vessels, one to the west and one to the east, while the crowd called on sky and earth to rain and conceive. At first the Mysteries promised not immortality but a better lot in the underworld; death was pictured as a new beginning, like a shoot rising from a buried seed.
Its roots appear to be very old. Finds suggest a Bronze Age farming cult, and a private building stood beneath the great initiation hall, the Telesterion, in Mycenaean times. Some scholars trace links to Minoan Crete, where a painting from Phaistos shows a goddess rising from the ground with a flower for a head. The town's name seems to be pre-Greek, perhaps tied to the birth goddess Eileithyia.
The calendar ran in two stages. The Lesser Mysteries took place at Agrai in early spring, while the Greater Mysteries followed yearly, with extra splendour every fourth year, and initiates had to wait until the following September to attend them. The rites later spread to Rome. English owes them words too: mystery comes from mysterion, a secret rite, and mystic from mystikos, connected with the Mysteries.
Source: Eleusinian Mysteries
