Eleusinian Mysteries

Summary

The Eleusinian Mysteries are the rites of Demeter and her daughter Persephone at Eleusis, on the coast of Attica west of Athens, open only to those initiated into them; the initiate is called a mystēs. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how they began. When Hades carried off Persephone with Zeus's consent, her mother in anger left the gathering of the gods and went among people in the form of an old woman whom no one recognised, until she came to Eleusis and sat by the Maiden Well in the shade of an olive. The daughters of Celeus, the local king, came to draw water; she told them her name was Doso, that pirates had carried her off from Crete by force, that she had fled from them and wandered until she arrived, and asked them to which house she might go to work.

She was taken into Celeus's house and sat silent, neither eating nor drinking in grief for her daughter, until Iambe made her laugh with her jests. Queen Metaneira offered her wine; she refused it, saying it was not lawful for her, and asked for barley meal mixed with water and soft mint, and the drink was made for her; the hymn calls it the kykeōn. She then nursed the queen's son Demophoon and laid him in the fire at night to make him immortal, until his mother saw her and screamed; Demeter in anger revealed herself, ordered the people to build her a temple and altar above the well of Callichorus, and said: "I myself will teach my rites". They built it; she sat in it apart from the gods and kept the earth from sprouting, so that people ploughed and sowed barley and nothing came up.

When Persephone came back, having eaten a pomegranate seed that bound her to a third of the year below, Demeter made the crops grow again, then went to the kings of Eleusis, Triptolemus, Diocles, Eumolpus and Celeus, showed them the conduct of her rites and taught them her mysteries, "awful mysteries which no one may in any way transgress or pry into or utter, for deep awe of the gods checks the voice. Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries; but he who is uninitiate and who has no part in them never has lot of like good things once he is dead, down in the darkness and gloom".

The Mysteries were a public festival every year. Herodotus tells how an Athenian exile with the Persians on the Thriasian plain in 480 BCE, when Attica had been emptied of its people, saw a cloud of dust advancing from Eleusis as if raised by thirty thousand men and heard a cry, and told his companion: "Every year the Athenians observe this festival for the Mother and the Maiden, and any Athenian or other Hellene who wishes is initiated; the voice you hear is the 'Iacchus' they cry at this festival".

The idea the Mysteries turn on is that the initiate repeats what Demeter did at Eleusis and then sees what may not be told. The mother grieved and fasted, then drank the kykeōn, then appeared in her own form, then brought the grain back to the earth when her daughter came back from beneath it. The hymn makes the reward a sight, "happy is he who has seen", and places its fruit after death. So Cicero says Athens gave mankind nothing better than these mysteries, in which people learned "the beginnings of life, and received a way of living with joy and of dying with a better hope".

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the Greek essays do not read the place name: Eleusis comes from the Greek stem eleuth-, which gives eleusomai, "I will come", and eleusis, "coming, arrival". Without its initial vowel and the ending -sis, this stem is Arabic lādha: Lane says lādha bihi means he had recourse to it for refuge or protection, and malādh is a refuge. The l is l, the w is w, and Greek th answers dh, both being sounds made between the teeth; it drops before the s, as it does in eleusomai. The story fits this sense: Demeter came to Eleusis a fugitive from pirates, as she said, asking which house would shelter her, Celeus's house took her in, and the place became a refuge to which every initiate came.

Linguistic Root

Liddell–Scott–Jones gives eleusis as "coming, arrival"; the verb myō as "close, be shut", of the eyes, the mouth or any opening, whence the mystēs, who keeps his mouth shut on what he has seen; and the kykeōn as a potion containing barley groats, known from the Iliad and Odyssey, with various ingredients, among them those of the Hymn to Demeter. Pausanias says the place was named after a hero Eleusis, whom some make a son of Hermes. LSJ, eleusis, myō, kykeōn, Pausanias 1.38.7.

So the reading covers the stem eleuth- alone; the initial e- is a vowel Greek adds before l and r, and -sis is a noun ending. In Greek the stem is that of the common verb of coming, which is why the Greeks explain the place name by Demeter's coming there. The Arabic reading does not contradict that sense but narrows it: the coming of a fugitive seeking refuge. The limit of the reading is that Greek th answers Semitic t in borrowed names more often than dh, so it needs another Semitic witness of l-w-dh in a place name.

Key Mythic Narratives

What survives of the secret

The initiates kept the secret so well that reports of what happened inside the sanctuary are few. Pausanias writes: "My dream forbade the description of the things within the wall of the sanctuary, and the uninitiated are of course not permitted to learn that which they are prevented from seeing". The clearest remnant is a formula reported by Clement of Alexandria, a Christian writing against the mysteries, so a hostile witness: "the token of the Eleusinian mysteries: I have fasted, I have drunk the cup; I have received from the box; having done, I put it into the basket, and out of the basket into the chest". Its first part agrees with the hymn: Demeter's fast in Celeus's house, then her drinking the kykeōn.

Heracles the initiate

Heracles is said to have been purified and initiated at Eleusis before going down to the underworld to fetch Cerberus, so that initiation was the equipment of one who goes down to the dead. See descent to the underworld.

Symbolic Reading

The Greek rereading essay reads the story of Demeter and Persephone as an agricultural calendar: Demeter is the power of growth, Persephone the seed that goes under the earth and comes out again, Hades the depth of the earth where seeds are kept, so that her third of the year below is winter and her return is spring. The Mysteries add something to this reading: the initiate does not only watch the grain come back, he hopes for himself what the seed achieves, to come out from under the earth to a "good lot".

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Herodotus says Isis is Demeter in the Greek language, that the Egyptians enact by night, on a lake at Sais, the sufferings of a god he will not name, meaning Osiris, and call it the Mysteries, and that the festival of Demeter which the Greeks call the Thesmophoria was brought out of Egypt by the daughters of Danaus. In the mysteries of Isis in Apuleius the initiate says: "I approached the boundary of death, I trod the threshold of Proserpina, I was carried through all the elements and returned; at midnight I saw the sun shining with a brilliant light; I approached the gods below and the gods above face to face". In both places the mysteries are a going down to death and a return that the initiate lives through himself; the difference is that at Eleusis Demeter waits for her daughter's return, while Isis gathers up her dead husband.

The drink that breaks the mourner's fast at Eleusis stands beside the food of immortality, but the kykeōn gives no immortality in this life: Demophoon himself lost it when his mother screamed, and the initiates' reward became a lot after death. The daughter's return and the grain's return together are forms of the dying and rising god and of the agricultural calendar.