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We have dealt extensively with the mystery-cults which took form in Syria, Thrace, and Phrygia. Now we turn to the Eleusinian ritual of the Greeks. In this Eleusinian ritual, the gory, lustful, and violent elements which distinguish the primitive Dionysus are wholly absent; and the reasons for this are apparent:
It is probable that the Isis-worship, centered at Coptas in Egypt, had become more or less independent by 1600 B.C.E.; and it is certain that Demeter was Isis with a new name and in another habitat. The upper-class Athenians of 1500-1000 B.C.E. found the fierce and bloody Osiris repellent and revolting; but they took to their hearts his beneficent sister, altered her in a few details, gave her a daughter (Persephone), instead of a son or a brother-husband, to rescue from death and oblivion, and made of them their soter/savior-substitutes.
Let us begin with some background information.
Greek meter is "mother." De is the delta, or triangle, a female -genital sign known as "the letter of the vulva" in the Greek sacred alphabet, as in India it was the Yoni Yantra, or yantra of the vulva. Corresponding letters—Sanskrit "dwr," Celtic "duir," Hebrew "daleth" — meant the Door of birth, death, or the sexual paradise. Thus, Demeter was what Asia called "the Doorway of the Mysterious Femi-nine . . . the root from which Heaven and Earth sprang." In Mycenae, one of Demeter's earliest cult centers, "tholos" tombs with their triangular doorways, short vaginal passages and round domes, repre-sented the womb of the Goddess from which rebirth might come. Doorways generally were sacred to women. In Sumeria they were painted red, representing the female "blood of life." In Egypt, door-ways were smeared with real blood for religious ceremonies, a custom copied by the Jews for their Passover rites.
The triangle-door-yoni symbolized Demeter's trinity. Like all the oldest forms of the basic Asiatic Goddess she appeared as Virgin, Mother, and Crone, or Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, like Kali-Cunti who was the same yoni-mother. Demeter's Virgin form was Kore, the Maiden, sometimes called her "daughter," as in the classical myth of the abduction of Kore, which divided the two aspects of the Goddess into two separate individuals. Demeter's Mother form had many names and titles, such as Despoena, "the Mistress"; Daeira, "the Goddess"; the Barley-Mother; the Wise One of Earth and Sea; or Pluto, "Abundance." This last name was transferred to the male underworld god said to have taken the Maiden into the earth-womb during the dark season when fields lay fallow. But this was a late, artificial myth. The original Pluto was female, and her "riches" were poured out on the world from her breasts.
The Crone phase of Demeter, Persephone-the-Destroyer, was identified with the Virgin in late myth, so the Maiden abducted into the underworld was sometimes Kore, sometimes Persephone. Some of the Destroyer's other, earlier names were Melaina, the Black One; Demeter Chthonia, the Subterranean One; or The Avenger (Erinys). Her black-robed, mare-headed idol, her mane entwined with Gorgon snakes, appeared in one of her oldest cave-shrines, Mavrospelya, the Black Cave, in Phigalia (southwest Arcadia). She carried a dolphin and a dove, symbols of womb and yoni. Like the devouring death--goddess everywhere, she was once a cannibal. She ate the flesh of Pelops, then restored him to life in her cauldron. She was as fearsome as every other version of the Crone. The legendary medieval Night--Mare—an equine Fury who tormented sinners in their sleep—was based on ancient images of Mare-headed Demeter.
Her cult was already well established at Mycenae in the 13th century B.C.E. and continued throughout Greece well into the Chris-tian era, a length of time almost equal to the lifespan of Christianity itself. Her temple at Eleusis, one of the greatest shrines in Greece, became the center of an elaborate mystery-religion. Sophocles wrote, "Thrice happy they of men who looked upon these rites ere they go to Hades's house; for they alone there have true life." Aristides said, "The benefit of the festival is not merely the cheerfulness of the moment and the freedom and respite from all previous troubles, but also the possession of happier hopes concerning the end, hopes that our life hereafter will be the better, and that we shall not lie in darkness and filth—the fate that is believed to await the uninitiated." Isocrates said: "Demeter . . . being graciously minded towards our forefathers because of their services to her, services of which none but the initiated may hear, gave us the greatest of all gifts, first, those fruits of the earth which saved us from living the life of beasts, and secondly, that rite which makes happier the hopes of those that participate therein concerning both the end of life and their whole existence."
Eleusis meant "advent." Its principal rites brought about the advent of the Divine Child or Savior, variously named Brimus, Dionysus, Triptolemus, Iasion, or Eleuthereos, the Liberator. Like the corn, he was born of Demeter-the-earth and laid in a manger or winnowing basket. His flesh was eaten by communicants in the form of bread (again the Eucharist), made from the first or last sheaves. His blood was drunk in the form of wine. Like Jesus, he entered the Earth and rose again. Communicants were supposed to partake of his immortality, and after death they were known as Demetreioi, blessed ones belonging to Demeter.
Revelations were imparted to the initiate through secret "things heard, things tasted, and things seen." This formula immediately calls to mind the three admonitory monkeys covering ears, mouth, and eyes, supposed to illustrate the maxim, "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil." Was the "evil" a secret descended from Eleusinian religion? Demeter was worshipped as "the Goddess" by Greek peasants all the way through the Middle Ages, even up to the 19th century at Eleusis where she was entitled "Mistress of Earth and Sea."
Early Christians were much opposed to the Eleusinian rites because of their overt sexuality, even though their goal was "regeneration and forgiveness of sins." Asterius said, "Is not Eleusis the scene of descent into the darkness, and of the solemn acts of intercourse between the hierophant and the priestess, alone together? Are not the torches extinguished, and does not the large, the numberless assembly of common people believe that their salvation lies in that which is being done by the two in the darkness?" Fanatic monks destroyed the temple of these sexual mysteries in 396 A.D., but the site remained holy to the Goddess's votaries, and the ceremonies were carried on there and elsewhere.
Rustics never ceased believing that Demeter's spirit was manifest in the final sheaf of the harvest, often called the Demeter, the Corn Mother, the Old Woman, etc. At harvest festivals it was often dressed it woman's clothing and laid in a manger to make the cattle thrived Secret anti-Christian doctrines of medieval Freemasonry also drew some symbolism from the cults of the ancient Mistress of Earth and Sea, particularly the masonic sacred image of Plenty: "an ear of corn neat a fall of water." The ultimate Mystery was revealed at Eleusis in "an ear of corn reaped in silence"—a sacred fetish that the Jews called shibboleth (Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, pp. 218-220).
The Greeks were well aware that Demeter was not indigenous (Diodorus Siculus, V, 69). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter reveals her foreign origin: for, upon arriving at Eleusis, she declares: "hither have I come in my wandering, nor know I what land this is."
Plutarch tells us that Persephone was called the autumnal air which causes the dissolution of the crops (Isis and Osiris, 66), that the grains cut by the reapers are "the limbs of Demeter"; and that "among the Greeks also many things are done which are similar to the Egyptian ceremonies in the shrines of Isis, and . . . at about the same time" (Ibid., 69). Diodorus Siculus declares that "Demeter was the discoverer of corn," who "also taught mankind how to prepare it for food"; and that she was known as Thesmophorus, because she taught men laws, which accustomed them "to the practice of justice" (Strabo, Geography, IX, i, 12).
We do not know just when the worship of Demeter was established at Eleusis; but we do know that she was venerated there during the Mycenaean period, probably as early as 1400 B.C.E. We know that the cult survived the edicts of Theodosius and continued without interruption until 396 A.D., when the Christian monks accompanying the Arian Alaric destroyed the shrine. Thus there was a continuous celebration of the Eleusinia for nearly two thousand years.
On a promontory at Eleusis facing the Gulf of Aegina some ten or twelve miles from Athens stood the courtyard and the magnificent temple of Demeter, which was built by the same Ictinus who also constructed the Parthenon at Athens. The road between the two cities was known as the Sacred Way (Pausanias, Description of Greece, I, xxxvi), because it was trodden by thousands of pilgrims and initiates every autumn when they journeyed to Eleusis to celebrate the Greater Mysteries.
The cult never aroused such hysterical ecstasy among its devotees as did Dionysus, the savior of the illiterate; Demeter was the refined soter-substitute of the cultured classes. It was therefore inevitable that she should pass away and that Dionysus should survive; because, as Frazer remarks, "while the higher forms of religious faith pass away like clouds, the lower stand firm and indestructible like rocks" (Golden Bough, IV: I, iv, 8).
That the Eleusinian mystery was held in the highest veneration by the ancients is amply witnessed. Hesiod tells us: "But do thou . . . work . . . that . . . worshipful Demeter of the fair crown love thee and fill thy barn with livelihood" (Works and Days). Diodorus relates that Hercules was initiated into the Eleusinian mystery at the time when Musaeus, son of Orpheus, was said to have been in charge of the temple (History, IV, 25); and it was believed that potency so acquired enabled the hero to drag the three-headed Cerberus into the light of day. Pausanias declares: "the Eleusinian mysteries and the Olympian Games seem to exhibit more than anything else the divine purpose'' (Description of Greece, V:I, x). A legend told by the same author (Ibid., VIII, xlii) concerning the people of Phigalia in Arcadia illustrates the power attributed to Demeter. Her statue there had been destroyed and her festivals neglected. A great dearth came over the land and the people were in danger of reverting to cannibalism and a diet of acorns. But when her statue was replaced and her mysteries reinstated, all was well again.
The mysteries of Demeter promised blissful immortality. The Hymn to Demeter declares: "Happy is he among mortals who has beheld these things and he that is uninitiate, and hath no lot in them, hath never equal lot in death beneath the murky gloom." Pindar, writing in the fifth century, declared that the happy survival of the soul is possible only for those who have "by good fortune, culled the fruit of the rite that releaseth from toil'' (The Dirges), that is, the Eleusinian, concerning which he continues: "Blessed is he who hath seen these things before he goeth beneath the hollow earth; for he understandeth the end of mortal life, and the beginning of a new life given of god'' (Fragments, p. 137). Isocrates, 436-338 B.C.E., declared that Demeter enabled mankind to rise above the status of beasts by conferring "the fruits of the earth;" and that she instituted "the holy rite which inspires in those who partake of it sweeter hopes regarding both the end of life and all eternity'' (Panegyrics, p. 27).
The Isis-Demeter cult reached Crete from Egypt late in the Minoan period and from there spread to Sicily and Athens. It is true that various locales claimed to be the scene of the Rape of Persephone and proudly exhibited the cave from which Hades emerged and back through which he bore the terrified maiden. Pausanias describes the spot (Description of Greece, I, xxxviii) where the Athenians said he abducted her; but Diodorus relates the myth as told by the Sicilians, which was the generally accepted version.!
The myth, according to The Hymn to Diameter and other sources, is briefly as follows:
Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, was picking flowers with Athena, Artemis, and other virgin goddesses: according to the very ancient Hymn, this was in the Nysian plain but, according to the Sicilians, it was in the Vale of Enna, near Syracuse. Thus we see that primitive tradition placed both Dionysus and Demeter at Nysa, a province near the Ethiopian border of Egypt, and therefore congenitally related to Isis and Osiris. At all events, Zeus had promised his brother Hades that Kore, or Persephone, should be his bride; and so he suddenly emerged in his chariot drawn by his fiery steeds, snatched the beautiful maiden, and bore her away, wailing from the depths of the sea.
From this incident grew a tale of mother-grief which embodies and surpasses the lament of Isis for Osiris, of Astarte for Adonis, of Cybele for Attis, of Orpheus for Eurydice, of Dionysus for Semele: all of these, of course, being variants of the same theme, symbolizing the grief and fear which crushed the heart of primitive humanity when the sun declined and winter killed the vegetation.
When her beloved daughter was nowhere to be found, Demeter, seeking her, sped like a bird over land and sea "for nine days . . . with torches burning in her hands," which according to the Sicilian version, had been kindled from the fires of Etna. From land to land she went inquiring of all. Arriving at Eleusis in the form of an old woman seeking humble servitude, she was met by the handmaidens of Metaneira, wife of Celeus, and became the nurse of her son. While the fragrant deity was transforming the infant Demophoon into immortality by the application of fire, Metaneira surprised her in the act; the goddess thereupon angrily let the child fall, denounced the stupid intrusion, revealed herself as the goddess of the law, the seasons, and the grain, and stood before the trembling woman in all the terrors of her divine majesty. The fact that in all those details the Demeter-story coincides with that of Isis in Syria as told by Plutarch proves that the Greek myth derives from the Egyptian. Demeter then commanded the people of Eleusis to build for her a "great temple and an altar thereby" on the jutting rock below the town; "the rites I myself will prescribe, that in time to come ye may pay them duly and appease my power."
The temple was forthwith built; but she sat apart "wasting away with desire for her deep-bosomed daughter." And, since she would not permit the grain to grow, famine ensued; and "now would the whole race of mortal men have perished utterly . . . if Zeus had not conceived a counsel within his heart."
That Demeter was not of the Olympian convocation is established by the myth that Zeus sent several gods one after another to her with precious gifts and with the offer of untold honors if she would permit the corn to grow again and accept her position among the gods. But she, brooding and sorrowing in her grief and wrath, sat still in stony silence. Now desperate, Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to persuade Hades to release his bride so that mankind might not perish; and to this Aidoneus apparently gave willing consent. But as Persephone left, he gave her a pomegranate seed, which she, not suspecting his treachery, took and ate. Hermes placed Persephone in his flashing chariot and conveyed her to her mother's temple at Eleusis, where she revealed the fact that she had eaten the fatal seed; at this, the heart of Demeter was riven, for she knew that her daughter would therefore be compelled forever to spend four or six months annually in the underworld.
By this stratagem, Hades obtained a part-time bride, and Demeter finally agreed to a compromise in which she permitted the grain to grow again in return for her daughter's companionship during the summer months; and she took her place reluctantly among the Olympians. For it seems that Zeus could take Persephone away from her mother, but could neither compel the latter to obey his will nor cause the plants to grow. And thus, while the Demeter-mystery was incorporated into the official religion of Greece, and particularly at Athens, it remained always separate and distinct.
The Sicilians celebrated two festivals to the Great Goddesses:
This was the reverse of the Athenian order, in which the Thesmophoria, or the festival of Demeter, was celebrated at harvest-time. In both, however, the goddesses symbolize the grain in its successive phases as buried seed, waving stalks, and harvested cereal.
It is obvious that the Demeter-concept combines the salient features of Isis with the Astarte-Tammuz myth. The Egyptian Earth Mother who forbids the practice of cannibalism, who prevents the relapse of mankind into savagery, who is and gives the grain, who imparts the knowledge by which it can be made into civilized food, who teaches mankind to live in communities under just law, and who heals with magical drugs and confers immortality, here coalesces with the Great Mother of Semitic lands mourning for her lost lover-son, who symbolizes the vegetation withered by autumnal frost. Demeter herself, however, remains always the beneficent Isis and never becomes the lascivious Ishtar seeking to instill life by the mystery of sexual communion. Demeter remains the pure and tender mother; she is chaste and noble, determined and inflexible, but always loving and protective.
Sometime around 1000 B.C.E. the Orphean Dionysus penetrated the Demeter-Persephone mystery; and in the sixth century, this new element was completely reconstructed and retained thereafter the central soteriological feature of the cult. This, however, belongs rather to Orphismthan to the Eleusinia.
By the time of Pausanias, 120 A.D., all Greece was filled with the statues, altars, and temples of Demeter; her festivals were celebrated everywhere; yet Eleusis remained always the center of her cult. Since it had been accepted since prehistoric times, there was no conflict between Demeter and Olympus; initiation into her ritual was, as it were, an extension of the prevailing religion. However, it was a complete and independent worship, and, once initiated into it, the votary required no other faith for time or eternity. Countless men and women, craving something more than the Olympians could offer, turned to Eleusis in their search for moral elevation as well as assurance of a better life beyond the grave. Come, said the hierophants of Demeter, as did those of Osiris in Egypt, all those clean of hand and pure in heart, and receive the better life in this world and the hope of eternal happiness hereafter.
Regarding salvation, the immortality expected through the Eleusinia was similar to the Homeric Elysium, which was formerly reserved for the greatest heroes or demigods or was conferred as a special boon of the gods; for example, we read that at death both Helen and Menelaus were rewarded with this supernal gift. But this was something totally beyond the reach of ordinary mortals: not even Achilles or Agamemnon was so rewarded, nor could anyone achieve such blessedness by any striving of his own. The Eleusinia, however, by initiation into the Greater Mysteries conferred upon many Athenians this ultimate Homeric hope. But this initiation and receival of salvation involved no special discipline or cataclysmic regeneration, and no organization of the initiates into separate communions or churches. There was no hint of Buddhist ethics, Brahmanic hell-torture, Zoroastrian eschatology, or an Osirian Judgment. It was only necessary to witness the holy spectacles, partake of certain rites and sacraments, and undergo a mystic initiation, possessing a magical efficacy; the mystagogue could then return to his usual pursuits, live his life as before, and yet hope for blessed immortality, in contradistinction to the hopeless and bloodless shadow-existence which was the common lot of the Homeric dead. There was no creed to embrace, no theology to master, no special discipline to accept. Perhaps it was this ease of salvation which made the masses skeptical of its efficacy; and Diogenes the Cynic was reported to have jeered that, according to the Eleusinians, the initiated liar and hypocrite would go into Elysium before the hero Epaminondas. We can only say that the Eleusinian Mystery constituted Greek soteriology at an early stage of its development.
We know that the Demeter-Persephone Mysteries were divided into the Lesser and the Greater (Schaff-Herzog, "Tribal Mysteries", II, 5-7) and that the former were open even to strangers and were performed at Athens in honor of Persephone about the middle of March to coincide with the vernal equinox; but to the Greater, which were performed at Eleusis, only Athenians were eligible and only after becoming initiated into the Lesser Mysteries.
Hippolytus discusses (Refutation, V, iii) the manner in which the Naasenes had absorbed various elements from the Eleusinian mystery. And from this we learn that the Lesser Mysteries, those of Kore or Persephone, were of an ethical nature, the sole purpose of which was to make the initiate just, noble, happy, and successful in the present
The Greater Mysteries, however, had a higher objective. Hippolytus says that the hierophant conducting the rite is not a eunuch like the priest of Cybele, but nevertheless a strict celibate "despising all carnal generation." This indicates that with the advent of the Orphic Neo-Dionysus at Eleusis, the cult had absorbed definite celibate characteristics previously unknown. And he says that at the height of the ceremony, the initiates are shown "an ear of corn in silence reaped," which was the mystic eucharist.
This indicates that those who had achieved the good life in this world through the Lesser Mysteries might look heavenward to the ritual of Demeter. Still summarizing the doctrines of the Naasenes, Hippolytus declares that after initiation into the "inferior mysteries," the neophytes were "admitted into the great and heavenly ones . . . where no unclean person shall enter, nor one that is natural or carnal; but it is reserved for the spiritual only. And those who come hither . . . become all of them bridegrooms, emasculated through the virginal spirit."
Through the Greater Mysteries, the initiates were to live forever in heaven with the good deity, by becoming the bridegroom of the savior-goddess. This was the second spiritual birth, which probably involved a vow of perpetual chastity and a mystery-ritual in which the mystae were wedded to the beneficent Isis-Demeter. The Christian Church was centuries later to call itself the Bride of Christ; and to this day the nuns in the Catholic communion wear wedding rings and consider themselves the virginal brides of Jesus.
Fortunately, in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii was found a series of seven frescoes describing the Orphic liturgy of initiation; and these establish the substantial accuracy of Hippolytus. The steps of the ritual were:
When we realize that this was the rite celebrated by untold thousands of Greeks and Romans over a millennium beginning with the sixth century B.C.E., we see how closely Christianity resembled the mysteries out of which it grew. In these Pompeian frescoes, the bride is a woman being married to Dionysus (similar to the bride of Christ) and we know that the mystery celebrated is the Orphic-Eleusinian because of the prominence of Kore and because of the flagellation which had its inception in the Zagreus-Titan myth. There were certainly similar wedding ceremonies in which male initiates became the mystical bridegrooms of Kore or Demeter. By the first century, their ritual had become thoroughly intertwined with the Orphic-Dionysiac.
That the secret and mysterious baskets, containing the Eleusinian sacrament, were well known to the ancient world, we learn from various sources. In The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Psyche invokes "the secrets of thy baskets" in her prayer to Demeter. Because early Christian writers converted from paganism sought to discredit the pagan mysteries, we sometimes learn more from them than from the reticent classical authors. "These mysteries are, in short," declares Clement of Alexandria contemptuously, "murders and funerals" (Exhortation, II), little realizing that the Passion of Christ was also a murder and a funeral. "Do you wish," demands Arnobius, "that we should reveal the mysteries and those ceremonies which are named by the Greeks Thesmophoria?" (Adversus Gentes, V, 24). He states pursuantly that the "cyceon" is a "wine thickened with spelt" (Ibid., 25), or barley. Thus we know that the sacred drink of the Eleusinians was a combination of the Osirian and the Dionysiac eucharist: which indicates that at Eleusis certain elements of the two cults had met and coalesced. Again we are met with a synthesis of religiious ideas; nothing new. Arnobius reproduces the sacred formula by which the mystae became full initiates: "I have fasted, and drunk the draught; I have taken out of the mystic cist, and put into the wicker basket; I have received again, and transferred to the little chest" (Ibid., 26). Clement of Alexandria, who lived about a century before Arnobius, describes the same ceremony with almost the same words (Exhortation, II).
Quite possibly Clement had himself been an Eleusinian. There is no doubt that he was describing the ritual depicted in the Pompeian frescoes by which the initiate believed himself transformed into the nature of divinity.
We know that every autumn the Greater Mysteries were celebrated at Athens and Eleusis; and, as nearly as we can now determine, the following agenda was observed:
After this rite, the mystae, filled with joyous exhilaration, purified by a moral catharsis, born again into eternal blessedness, and transfigured into divinity by these holy ceremonies, returned to Athens along the Sacra Fia.
The extent to which the cult of Demeter had become an integral element of Athenian life is witnessed by the fact that as soon as the annual Mysteries were concluded, the senate always met in extraordinary session to determine whether any one had been guilty of profanation in connection with the celebration. We learn from Thucydides and from Plutarch that Alcibiades (Parallel Lives) was tried in absentia and condemned to death for such impiety; and we know that Aeschylus was convicted of revealing the secrets of the mystery and acquitted only when it was established that he was not an initiate in the cult.
The influence of the Eleusinia upon Catholic Christianity was great indeed; and to this we shall call further attention in the proper place.
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